One of the things I tried not to skip out on is "specials." You know: library, art, P.E., music, etc. Those classes were sometimes the funniest part of an elementary schoolers' day, and I didn't want mine to miss out just because we're homeschooling. And though sometimes it was tempting to just stick with those core subjects and skip over the "extras," we made an effort this year to make a habit of keeping them in our schedule. I wasn't always awesome or consistent at it, but again we're learning as we go.
For library this year, my plan was to take the kids once a week for story time. This didn't go quite as expected though. I found that often the kids had a really hard time behaving themselves while we were there. Ironically, in one of the few places where I really needed them to be calm and quiet, we usually had one meltdown or another.
Check Calendar
One really nice feature that opened near the beginning of the school year at the library was the new children's garden. Here we are in October checking it out for the first time - and yes we are in shorts still amazingly!
Paper chains
March
April
At the beginning of the year, Caleb started out learning about music from his piano teacher and one of my friends, Ms. Grace. He was so excited for this opportunity and seemed to be catching on pretty quickly at first, but again this was difficult to juggle with the little ones. They had a hard time sitting through his lessons and it made it difficult for me to pay attention to what Grace was teaching so that I could help him with his work when he got home. At five, he definitely needed me to be more involved. Dave tried to help in the evenings some when he got home, but with soccer practice, church, Awana, etc. it just seemed there was always something else to do. It also was throwing off our daily routine to break in the middle of the day and try to make up the school work later. And, the kicker was that every week I found myself yelling at the kids as we were trying to get out the door to get there and then afterwards because they weren't listening. A wise friend of mine told me once, "If it's going to make you yell, don't do it," and that advice rang out loud and clear. Though Grace is an excellent teacher and I truly hope we have the opportunity to work with piano again in the near future, music lessons weren't a good fit for us this year..and that's okay.
We figured it out another way so that we got a little music instruction in nonetheless.
No comments:
Post a Comment