Our Homeschooling Day // January 2012

I've been wanting to do a day in the (homeschooling) life posts for a while now. We have some days flow well and we get a lot done and others are total train wrecks. At the end of the day my husband will ask the girls what we did in school, and while I know I have a record of the pages that we checked off in workbook A, B, or C, by the time we sit to dinner, I'm too tired to remember a lot of the nitty gritty details. This is my feeble attempt at recording some of that for my remembrance.

For any that might be newish to the blog, my crew consists of an 8 year old girl (2nd grade), 6 year old girl (kindergarten), 4 year old girl (pre-K-ish), and a 16 month old boy.

6:05   Up, coffee, check email/Facebook/Twitter, Bible study. My alarm goes off at 5:30, but apparently I hit the snooze a few times this morning.




7:10   Everyone is still asleep - we had a semi-late night last night because our power went off - and the girls and boy were up until about 9:30 pm. Hop in the shower.

7:30   I'm now clean. Little girls are up and the baby is making noise. Help little girls find clothes, diaper change, peek at email.

7:45   Head downstairs and start breakfast. N2 starts unloading the dishwasher - her new chore now that she is SIX. Nutella on toast for a couple girls, cereal for B, dry cereal + some egg for the boy, egg mcmuffin for me. Make T's lunch and check the fridge for our dinner plan. It's Wednesday/Awana, which means easy and fast: quesadillas for the kids, and T and I usually have something like fajitas or chips and salsa.


Morning tunes.

8:30   Start getting ready for a run to Office Depot before we start school. We are completely out of white paper and I have some printing that HAS to be done for church today before the aforementioned Awana. I visit with T while he checks his email and gets ready for work, girls are getting shoes, brushing teeth.

9:00   Leave for Office Depot.

10:00 Back home. (How did that take an hour?) N1 helps me start a load of laundry - her new chore now that N2 is six. The boy goes down for a nap. We read our Bible story (Catherine Vos Children's Story Bible about Jeroboam and Rehoboam). N1 works independantly on her Bible study homework, Explode the Code, handwriting and then reads. N2 reads a whole book to me for the first time: Annie and Snowball and the Prettiest House. We had a few words we needed help over, but all in all, this is the first real book that she's read out loud to me. Big stuff.



11:00   Check email and print a couple things for N1. We are reviewing our recent reading on Ben Franklin so I print some notebooking pages for her to write what she remembers about him. We go and look at our timeline on the wall and review where he fits in the history that we've covered so far and add the signing of the Declaration of Independence to the timeline. N2 is working on her Explode the Code and handwriting and a math worksheet I printed for her. B is alternating between drawing and playing. While they all work for a moment, I switch laundry.

11:45   Baby is up. N1 and I try to finish her Writing with Ease and First Language Lessons before lunch, but baby is too distracting. N2 and B have gotten out some of our math shapes and are playing a pattern game they made up. Minor meltdown because someone didn't follow the "rules" and pieces are thrown. Everything halts while order is (semi) restored and pieces picked up.

12:00 Lunch. N1 on baby duty for a moment while I find food. Kids have hot dogs, assorted fruit and chocolate ice cream. Totally healthy today. Ha. I eat leftover salad and baked potato and not-one-single-bite-of-ice-cream. Go me. : )

12:40 Girls are done with lunch, boy still eating. Little girls are playing upstairs and N1 is downstairs with me researching American Sign Language on her Dad's computer. Sweep kitchen, take out trash, tidy downstairs  while waiting on the boy.



 1:00   Check email. Nothing - yay. : ) We move into the boy's room and do our afternoon reading aloud there to contain him. Two chapters of The Long Winter.



2:00  Back to the school room. Finish N1's language arts + math. Little girls and boy are playing in a bedroom.

2:40   N1 done with math. I go to help with little girls with cleaning their room and fold a load of laundry.

3:00   Boy is down for a nap. I help N1 print a few pictures for something she's working on in her room, check twitter, get sleepy.



 3:40   Find something to drink and move to my comfy chair in my bedroom for (hopefully) about 1/2 hour rest time. The boy is still making noise in his room; the nap turns out to bust for this afternoon, but I leave him in there for a while longer. Little girls are listening to Christmas music (?) in their room and N1 is in her room listening to an audiobook by Alexander McCall Smith.

4:15   Give up on a nap for the boy. Get him up and head to the school room so he can play and I work on my Project Life album for a bit. Girls have gone outside to play and I can hear/see them from the school room window.

5:15 Start dinner. Girls eat, review verses for Awana, etc.

At this point, I quit trying to take notes on what went on. Girls + neighbor were delivered to Awana at 6:30 and I went to pick up a few holds at the library and some milk. Back home by 7:15 to put a very tired little guy to bed and wait for T (who was still at work) to get home. Long day for him. He goes to get the girls from Awana while I make dinner for the two of us, tidy the kitchen again, pick up a bit around the house and in the school room. We get little people home, jammied, and into bed by about 8:30/8:45 and then we collapse and watch a TV show on Hulu together. I attempt to read but am too sleepy by this point. Bed by 10:15.

All in all, this was a good day. (If I had taken notes on Thursday/yesterday, you would have noticed that it didn't flow as well). I prefer to do math in the morning, but of late, we have been doing it after lunch so we can get some of our reading done while the boy takes his morning nap. I imagine when he drops his morning nap, the schedule (such as it) will be reshuffled again. I would like to get us back to reading some while the girls eat breakfast and lunch, but I haven't made that happen. That needs to go down as a habit to resume for February.

Happy Friday to all!

I'm linking up with Simple Homeschool's Day in the Life series today.