The average day...(week 11)

Ever wonder what an average day looks like in our house? It's not easy to describe, so for a few days I shot short videos of us doing our average home school things, and put together this video:

Leif's finished watercolor. We both drew elephants, but he liked mine, so I made copies and all three of us water colored versions of this guy:

Front Row Seat (week 10)

Home Schooling is hard. I freaked out the first month or so. It was hard to tell if Leif was making progress, it was hard to get the boys to get along, it was hard to get the boys to focus. It still is many of those things much of the time. I sneak in workouts, I run to the grocery store when Charles is home with the boys, I sneak in showers whenever I can, often after the boys are in bed at night.
But just like other areas of parenting, every once in a while, there is a moment or a break through, and it make it all worth it.  This week had a few of those moments.

I knew that Leif was beginning to read but he was still very shy about it. He was so afraid to be wrong, so he would whisper his reading lessons. It sounded like he was getting them, and he seemed to be understanding, but it was hard to tell. On Wednesday, Charles got to be home for the morning which is unusual. He got to observe Leif doing some of his computer home school work. Leif actually read out loud to Charles. And then he read aloud with me during one of our Scaredy Cat reading lessons. Part of the assignment was for him to write his own sentence, choose punctuation and read it accordingly. He decided to put three different punctuation marks at the end and then read the sentence through three

times using different intonation based on the punctuation mark, just for fun.

Later during our math lesson Leif was learning how to add three single digit numbers together. He had done a lesson on that on Tuesday and had struggled with it. I worried that it was too advanced for him. But on Wednesday, the lesson explained it in a different way and Leif began adding three numbers out loud correctly. No finger counting, no Abacus, sometimes counting up but sometimes just knowing the correct sum.

I had the realization that home school is giving me a front row seat on my children's education, and it is very exciting and very rewarding.  

Our family!

Exhausted, and still content (week 9)

As I'm catching back up to date on the blog, I nearly forgot week 9. (March 3-7) It was a whirlwind of a week, filled with exhaustion and celebration, and some home school too.

Leif with his minion cupcakes.

While we were in Colorado, I needed to send out Leif's birthday party invitations for Leif's birthday on March 6th. Leif wanted to invite his entire Kindergarten class from public school, plus some new home school friends, church friend, etc. We talked him into having it at a playground, instead of our house for obvious reasons! The weather looked like it was going to be nice the weekend we were returning home from Colorado, so we scheduled it for that Sunday afternoon.
We arrived home on Friday night. I spent all of Saturday and Sunday morning frantically party planning, making minion cupcakes and decorations. Sunday afternoon was a beautiful, warm, fun afternoon! We had a pinata, 3-legged races, Duck-Duck-Goose, and Gru on the guitar. It was a wonderful fun celebration of our amazing 6 year old.

Charles helping Owen play Duck, Duck, Goose

Charles, dressed as Gru playing guitar.

 Sunday night I felt beyond exhausted. I finally got to bed after some clean up but was awakened by Owen a little before 4am. He was up until 6am (who knows why?) and finally fell back to sleep. I was so thankful that the kids and I were able to sleep in a little, and not have to rush Leif off to school. We were all very tired on Monday, the sort of day I dreaded when I first started to home school.
But, I got Leif set up with his computer lessons, and just decided to go easy on my end of teaching that day. Leif did his lessons, and had asked how Bricks were made, and we found a great documentary series on YouTube by the Discovery Channel called "How It's Made", which also has many other topics we've not yet watched. In the documentary, they mention the 3 Little Pigs, so we watched the 3 Little Pigs on YouTube as well. It ended up being a very peaceful, restful day, and I realized, if I can enjoy home schooling on a day when I am that exhausted, I think I really like this!

After our lesson on the food chain, we ate ice cream and tracked the chain from grass to ice cream. Leif's a good food model, isn't he?