A Not So Typical Day

For quite some time I have wanted to write about a typical day in our homeschool.  However, we have had very few of them lately so here is a snapshot of a not-so-typical day.

Yesterday started off like normal.  Six o'clock my alarm went off.  Todd and I both got up; he headed to the shower, while I headed downstairs to start the coffee and breakfast.  That is where our normal day stopped.  Normally, Bryce would head downstairs and have a seat at the kitchen island to eat breakfast while I  served Todd and myself.  A little later Brian would appear and sometime after 7:30 I would have to drag wake Bonnie up.  This morning Brian beat Bryce up and came walking down with his math book in hand.  It turns out that he took his math book to bed with him the night before and started working on next day's assignment.  By the time he got up he was almost done and was set on finishing his work before breakfast.  Who am I to say, "No, you can't do that?"  I, on the other hand, had been given a counter full of produce the day before and really needed to get it into the freezer so I decided to work on it before school started.

Typically, after breakfast I would have the kids brush their teeth, make their beds, and have a quiet time with the Lord.  By 8:30 everyone would be ready to head downstairs to the living room where we pray and read the Bible together.  (Right now we are reading through Genesis while we study the history of ancient Sumeria and ancient Mesopotamia.)  Not this morning. While Brian worked on math and ate his Cheerios, I worked on dicing up green peppers, snapping green beans, and husking corn all to go in the freezer.  By 7:30 Bryce joined us.  He, too, had a project he wanted to work on.  For extra credit in Awana, he was making a solar system.  The day before he made homemade playdoh and shaped the dough into the eight, not nine, planets.  Sorry Pluto.  Now that they were hardened he wanted to paint them and hang them for a mobile.  So there it was decided.

  On this school day, individual work will come first and group work , i.e. Bible, history, Latin, and Science will come second.

I am so proud of Brian this year.  He has really matured in his studies.  He is eager to do his work and has not shyed away from the difficult math i.e. long division, writing (although he still hates it) and reading (he will read only what is required of him, nothing more.).  But that is ok.  Once he finished his math, Brian took his Language test.

Here is my thinking.  As long as the work gets done, I don't care what order it gets done in.  There are some things, like I mentioned above, that we do as a group.  We read the Bible together and discuss it as a family.  For history, we use Tapestry of Grace to guide us in our studies and so we study the same events and time frames together as well.  Latin is new for us this year and we are using Latina Christiana as a family.  On the science front,  Bonnie and Brian are using Apologia's General Science.  We just finished Module 1 where Bonnie made a 100% on her test and Brian made a 96%. Both were really excited for how well they did.  Bryce is working through Abeka's Fourth Grade Science.  He is really enjoying having his own science course and all the work that goes with it.

Typically, I like to do Bible and History together and then let the kids break off to do their inidividual work.  Usually they can get their math, language, and spelling done before lunch.  After lunch, we regroup to go over Latin and then I teach science to Bonnie and Brian and then to Bryce. When everything goes well, we can finish our day by 2pm.  Of course, there are always those days when everyone seems to drag and it is 5 oclock before we pack up but those days are rare now.

Typical or not, our day ended well and everyone learned.