Yesterday was a challenging day. I was hoping today would go smoothly, and it did.
We got started with school around 10:40, well over an hour earlier than yesterday. I also managed to pick up the house a bit and start a load of dishes prior to lessons. My daughter woke up in a better mood, and I could tell from the get-go that today would be a good one.
As usual, I gave her the choice of which of her morning work she wanted to complete first. She chose spelling, I'm sure because it is a new spelling program and still a novelty. I encouraged her to write her words in cursive because she needs more practice, but she insisted that she already gets enough handwriting practice and chose to print. I'll have to think about how I want to handle that, because I really would like her to do it in cursive, but in our household dealing with adhd and anxiety, I have to also think really hard about which battles are most important to fight. Battling about cursive or print could well derail our entire morning, so I chose to let her print. I didn't need any meltdowns today!
Next she chose to do her reading lesson. Because my dd shows strong signs of having dyslexia, and because she is in grade 4 and still a struggling reader, we do concentrated reading and spelling lessons most days in addition to our more typical Waldorf main lesson work. We are using Sequential Spelling and All About Reading. I planned to do half the reading lesson, which is as much as we usually get through in a morning, but my daughter caught a glimpse of an activity in the second half of the lesson that looked fun and wanted to do it today. We had to take the time to cut it out and tape the pieces together, which added to our reading time, but she really loved the activity and her little brother played with the pieces after she was done. Then it was time for piano. Unlike yesterday, she was willing to have her piano lesson and stayed focused throughout. I even offered her a 10 minute break between reading and piano, but she wanted to jump right into the lesson. That doesn't often happen!
Our lunch break was shorter than normal because I'd promised my kindergartener we'd do a special activity today--sewing gnomes--and he kept asking me when we were going to start. My 4th grader wanted to make one too. She added some embroidered details to her gnome, which made it adorable but also added to the time the activity took. In the meantime, after my son finished his gnome, he and I redecorated the nature table for early spring. Later, after he went into another room, my daughter said the way he decorated it was not good enough and proceeded to change everything he had done, despite my requests to leave it alone for a few days. The kindergartener was disappointed when he came back and saw all his work changed, but he then ran right off to play.
At this point is was about 1:30 and we were finally starting main lesson... this is not too far behind the time we got started with it yesterday. My daughter was still sewing her gnome, so I went to the piano and began singing and playing our daily songs. Sometimes I find it more effective to ease into main lesson this way. If I sing and play, she will often come join me of her own accord. That didn't happen today due to her still being focused on the gnome project, so I then joined her at the dining room table and continued to sing. She joined me for some of the songs, but not as I recited our alliterative verse and our poem. I realized--too late--that I *still* forgot to copy our poem onto a poster for the wall. Oops! Oh well. I'll try for tomorrow.
I'm getting ready to start into my daughter's review word problems when I glance at my lesson plan and realize we're supposed to do clay modelling today. I try to do it once a week during math blocks, using the time to create pure forms or do simple animals or other things that don't really go along with most main lessons. It happens fairly often that I forget about an activity that I had planned to do, despite it always being written out in my notes. Luckily I remembered today just in time. Both kids wanted to participate. When my daughter finished her triangular prism (our project for today), she decided to make a volcano like her younger brother, so once again this activity ended up being longer than I anticipated.
All of this made the actual content portion of our main lesson rushed. We need to be done by 3:10 when my public schooled 14-year-old walks in the door. I seem to have a knack for doing all the fun activities on the same day, and then they take too much time...
I had planned two word problems to start off with. One I knew would not be a problem, and it wasn't. She solved it easily and enjoyed the process. I almost didn't even introduce the second one, but at the last minute I decided to. She did finish it, but needed a lot more encouragement as she got bored partway through. It is hard to gauge her attention span and also to balance pushing her to do just a bit more with not overdoing things.
Yesterday my daughter balked at finishing even a dozen of the 60 simplifying fractions problems on her workbook page. So this morning I turned the rest of the problems into a bingo game, and that is what we did for the bulk of the main lesson. (It is day 2 of our new math block, so we are still reviewing past concepts. Tomorrow we start the new material, which will be multiplying fractions.) When my daughter took her first look at the game and realized that it was all about simplifying fractions, her immediate reaction was, "Oh no. I'm not doing this." I had to think quickly before the entire activity was derailed, so I immediately said, "We'll take turns choosing the problems from the bowl. I have to solve the ones I choose, and you solve the ones you choose." That did the trick, and she was cooperative the rest of the time. When I won the first bingo, she almost got frustrated and gave up, but then decided to go on to blackout (which I was hoping would happen--more problems to solve!) She ended up winning the game.
The last thing I wanted my daughter to do today was to finish the fraction art project she'd started yesterday but petered out after 10 minutes. We had 15 minutes left in our day, and I thought that would be about right for her attention span today. I thought she would balk when she found out what our last activity was, but she was agreeable to it. However, once she started to work, she wasn't really that into it. She made a few additions, but this time when she said she didn't want to do any more, I let it go. We put the piece into her main lesson book and that was that.
I do think we need to get our days started earlier, but after 6.5 years of homeschooling, I recognize that probably isn't going to happen. We are just a family that takes awhile to get going in the mornings. It can be a challenge during the 2-3:00 hour; it really isn't the most optimal time for learning. Normally we are doing main lesson just a bit earlier, but with both a sewing project and a modelling activity, everything else was pushed back. Overall I thought the day went extremely well,, it was mainly the last hour that turned it into more of a "typical" day than a "really awesome" day.
We got started with school around 10:40, well over an hour earlier than yesterday. I also managed to pick up the house a bit and start a load of dishes prior to lessons. My daughter woke up in a better mood, and I could tell from the get-go that today would be a good one.
As usual, I gave her the choice of which of her morning work she wanted to complete first. She chose spelling, I'm sure because it is a new spelling program and still a novelty. I encouraged her to write her words in cursive because she needs more practice, but she insisted that she already gets enough handwriting practice and chose to print. I'll have to think about how I want to handle that, because I really would like her to do it in cursive, but in our household dealing with adhd and anxiety, I have to also think really hard about which battles are most important to fight. Battling about cursive or print could well derail our entire morning, so I chose to let her print. I didn't need any meltdowns today!
Next she chose to do her reading lesson. Because my dd shows strong signs of having dyslexia, and because she is in grade 4 and still a struggling reader, we do concentrated reading and spelling lessons most days in addition to our more typical Waldorf main lesson work. We are using Sequential Spelling and All About Reading. I planned to do half the reading lesson, which is as much as we usually get through in a morning, but my daughter caught a glimpse of an activity in the second half of the lesson that looked fun and wanted to do it today. We had to take the time to cut it out and tape the pieces together, which added to our reading time, but she really loved the activity and her little brother played with the pieces after she was done. Then it was time for piano. Unlike yesterday, she was willing to have her piano lesson and stayed focused throughout. I even offered her a 10 minute break between reading and piano, but she wanted to jump right into the lesson. That doesn't often happen!
Our lunch break was shorter than normal because I'd promised my kindergartener we'd do a special activity today--sewing gnomes--and he kept asking me when we were going to start. My 4th grader wanted to make one too. She added some embroidered details to her gnome, which made it adorable but also added to the time the activity took. In the meantime, after my son finished his gnome, he and I redecorated the nature table for early spring. Later, after he went into another room, my daughter said the way he decorated it was not good enough and proceeded to change everything he had done, despite my requests to leave it alone for a few days. The kindergartener was disappointed when he came back and saw all his work changed, but he then ran right off to play.
At this point is was about 1:30 and we were finally starting main lesson... this is not too far behind the time we got started with it yesterday. My daughter was still sewing her gnome, so I went to the piano and began singing and playing our daily songs. Sometimes I find it more effective to ease into main lesson this way. If I sing and play, she will often come join me of her own accord. That didn't happen today due to her still being focused on the gnome project, so I then joined her at the dining room table and continued to sing. She joined me for some of the songs, but not as I recited our alliterative verse and our poem. I realized--too late--that I *still* forgot to copy our poem onto a poster for the wall. Oops! Oh well. I'll try for tomorrow.
I'm getting ready to start into my daughter's review word problems when I glance at my lesson plan and realize we're supposed to do clay modelling today. I try to do it once a week during math blocks, using the time to create pure forms or do simple animals or other things that don't really go along with most main lessons. It happens fairly often that I forget about an activity that I had planned to do, despite it always being written out in my notes. Luckily I remembered today just in time. Both kids wanted to participate. When my daughter finished her triangular prism (our project for today), she decided to make a volcano like her younger brother, so once again this activity ended up being longer than I anticipated.
All of this made the actual content portion of our main lesson rushed. We need to be done by 3:10 when my public schooled 14-year-old walks in the door. I seem to have a knack for doing all the fun activities on the same day, and then they take too much time...
I had planned two word problems to start off with. One I knew would not be a problem, and it wasn't. She solved it easily and enjoyed the process. I almost didn't even introduce the second one, but at the last minute I decided to. She did finish it, but needed a lot more encouragement as she got bored partway through. It is hard to gauge her attention span and also to balance pushing her to do just a bit more with not overdoing things.
Yesterday my daughter balked at finishing even a dozen of the 60 simplifying fractions problems on her workbook page. So this morning I turned the rest of the problems into a bingo game, and that is what we did for the bulk of the main lesson. (It is day 2 of our new math block, so we are still reviewing past concepts. Tomorrow we start the new material, which will be multiplying fractions.) When my daughter took her first look at the game and realized that it was all about simplifying fractions, her immediate reaction was, "Oh no. I'm not doing this." I had to think quickly before the entire activity was derailed, so I immediately said, "We'll take turns choosing the problems from the bowl. I have to solve the ones I choose, and you solve the ones you choose." That did the trick, and she was cooperative the rest of the time. When I won the first bingo, she almost got frustrated and gave up, but then decided to go on to blackout (which I was hoping would happen--more problems to solve!) She ended up winning the game.
The last thing I wanted my daughter to do today was to finish the fraction art project she'd started yesterday but petered out after 10 minutes. We had 15 minutes left in our day, and I thought that would be about right for her attention span today. I thought she would balk when she found out what our last activity was, but she was agreeable to it. However, once she started to work, she wasn't really that into it. She made a few additions, but this time when she said she didn't want to do any more, I let it go. We put the piece into her main lesson book and that was that.
I do think we need to get our days started earlier, but after 6.5 years of homeschooling, I recognize that probably isn't going to happen. We are just a family that takes awhile to get going in the mornings. It can be a challenge during the 2-3:00 hour; it really isn't the most optimal time for learning. Normally we are doing main lesson just a bit earlier, but with both a sewing project and a modelling activity, everything else was pushed back. Overall I thought the day went extremely well,, it was mainly the last hour that turned it into more of a "typical" day than a "really awesome" day.
Comments
What piano method are you using for S? I need to start up again with Ethan. I started him with piano adventures but didnt get very far. But i think its time to try again.
Kaylene
We are using Piano Adventures, and I'm embarrassed to say that it has now been well over a year, and we still aren't finished with the Primer. I'm not very consistent with lessons.