Our Master Plan

Today was the first "official" week of our second year of homeschooling. Kind of. The truth is I really subscribe to the "always learning" model and our schooling is an eclectic combination of traditional school at home and unschooling.

Here's a bit of our schedule as it looks right now and some points about what feels like it's working and what needs some tweaking.

8:00 am - Wake Up!

Everyone starts to wake up. Well, Gavriel wakes up sometime closer to 7 and Adin sets his alarm at 7:45. By the time I wake up which is usually closer to 8:30 Gavriel and Adin are already davening Shacharit together.   I have to say that getting to sleep in and have my kids sleep in is probably the best part of homeschooling. I actually go through my days without the chronic fatigue that I used to live with and I love not waking kids up from a deep sleep to shove them out the door. LOVE IT.

The kids each have their own morning routine check list that they do.

Modeh Ani
Wash Negel Vasser
Wash Face
Brush Teeth
Brush Hair
Clean room (including making the bed)
Put way laundry (*I'll share about our laundry system some other time)
Eat Breakfast
Clean up Breakfast
Daven
Hebrew (or for Adin Bar Mitzvah Prep)

Right now the girls are using the Berman House Hebrew Through Prayer  curriculum. As I was finding the link I also saw that they have some interactive CD's so I'll hopefully get some of those as well. 

Adin is working on getting the prayer service down and his Bar Mitzvah. I wanted to get him some of the Yesodot Haloshon workbooks that they used at DAT but I was amazed to find they have an incredibly archaic ordering service where I have to send them a check! By mail! So, I did what I usually do when faced with something that takes more steps than I want it to: freeze up and take no action at all (yes, I'm working on this). I may still order them but I also may just see if Berman House has something that is suitable for him as they are much easier to order from. 

Amazingly they mostly do this all very well as they are extremely motivated for the next part of the day.

9:30 am - Minecraft!
(ideally but today it was @ 10am because Gavriel helps with the Hebrew and he was out tutoring and did not get back unitl 9:30)

At this point they get 1 hour of their favorite computer game Minecraft (I'm sure you'll hear more on that later as well).

I try to use this time to get some of my own work done and/or prep for the rest of our homeschool day.

10:30 is snack time and story time. 

This morning they had some junkie pudding but it motivated them to get off the computer, made them really happy and I convinced myself it at least had some protein in it. (I originally bought the pudding on a whim at Costco as a bribe for the kids to take with them to the new Boulder Explore program that they just starting going to once a week on Tuesdays... but it seems to have sneaked it's way into other days of the week as these things always do. (*this is one of those areas where I do a little pendulum swing trying to find the right emotional health of being flexible with food and the physical health of getting as much nutrition in them as possible).

Right now we are reading Story of the World - which is a history curriculum. Right now we mostly just read the story and Aderet enjoys doing the coloring pages. We also have some two Usbone world history encyclopedias that I bust out and open to the cooresponding pages and check out the maps. There are also suggestions of complimentary books we can get out of the library so I plan on strewing those around so if anyone is interested in learning more they can.

11:00  One Hour of School 

This is the part of our day that feels the most like traditional school and also is the most challenging as I'm working with 3 different kids on different materials at the same time. Today I think it went as well as it could have for the first day.

All of the kids are using Mammoth Math  for Math curriculum. Right now Adin is doing some finishing up/review of 5th grade and I've started both of the girls on 2cd grade as they are really on the same level.

For Language Arts the girls are working through the Explode the Code workbooks.

So, I got busy and have not finished this post but I'll hopefully get to it later...

Aderet and Abba Davening

Long Lake Hike

Aderet found this very cool caterpillar. Turns out it's a Spotted Tussock Moth.

After we got home from the hike we did some research on Teddy Roosevelt and his work to establish the National Parks. That brought us to a really quirky history cartoon called Histeria that the kids really like.

Everyone spent sometime drawing in their journals.

Curious and Curious

I feel a bit nervous trying to write the first entry for our new blog to document our second year of homeschooling. I say homeschooling because that is what has inspired and given space to this venture but really I'm hoping to create more seamlessness between our learning and our life. 

I used to be an avid writer of papers, letters and journals and I have not written much besides grocery lists in years. So, part of this blogging experiment is for me to find my writers voice (and hopefully other parts of myself) again. 

The first name that I thought of for this blog was "finding our way" (but that was taken). I turned 40 this year and questions of personal identity are bubbling over. Who am I? What do I really believe? What's important to as I move into the second half of my life? What are the core values that I want to pass onto my children and how do I go about doing that? How do I support my children in finding their own voices and cultivating their strengths? So this blog is partially to share with family and friends bits and pieces of our life but also as a mirror for myself. I'm curious to see what creative connected whole might emerge from the puzzle of pieces we lay out here. 

Curiosity is the goal here. Many years ago a mentor of mine told me to, "stay curious as long as possible." I've always thought of that in terms of how to show up when dealing with a particular complicated or challenging situation. But the truth is, this whole being alive thing is really a complicated, challenging situation. 

I also like that curious has two meanings. One curious being: eager to learn more, and the other curious  being: rousing interest because of novelty or strangeness. While at other points in my life I've worked very hard to make everything line up and make sense at this point in my life I'm prepared to be both curious and curious.