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!