We made it through our first day back with our full fall schedule! As promised it was much more structured than my loosey-goosey summer schema and the workload is much heavier. My brain is tired and so is my voice. It is a lot of reading and I couldn’t get through it all without my dear husband reading to one so I could work with the other.
We start out at 7:30 with our 5 things and then breakfast at 8:00 during which we do recitation and read our Bible selection for the day. After clean up, around 9:00, we move into the dining room for math and copywork/dictation (and handwriting for Madison and Maya). Charlie gets a spot at the table and I ask you, how does he know we’re doing math? He gets out his tiny cars and practices counting them (up to four and then it’s anyone’s guess). Then moves on to the blocks and stacks them by color and size while Maddie and Makenna use them for their lessons. Maya’s math book isn’t in yet, so she counts with Charlie and then moves on to her own activities. When the girls pack up their math things, Charlie picks up his blocks and hands me the box, “Here Mom.” This is all unscripted for Charlie. Believe me, I dearly wish he’d play with trucks on the sidelines while I work with the girls. But he’s right there in it with surprisingly intuitive correctness for a two-year-old.
About this time (10:00ish) dear husband is back from walking the dog and ready to help with the reading. This is a literature based program so there is a lot of it for everyone (did I already mention that?). But thankfully they’re short selections from several books so we’re not stuck on one reading for long which keeps it stimulating. They’re so excited to get their noses in these books. I’ve been dangling them in front of the kids for weeks. Makenna confessed that she snuck in a little reading from the Burgess Animal Book a week ago. Now, how can you get mad at that?
At this point, Maya and Charlie play with whatever looks interesting from the closet and make enough noise that Maddie and I shut ourselves up in her room so she (we) can apply her (our) full attention. The reading is a slow process as they are mastering the art of narration and we’re just getting our feet wet with a more difficult level of literature. Right now they give a narration after each paragraph—the goal being to lengthen the amount of reading before a narration, sharpen attention, and train the ability to narrate in more detail. At some point Makenna will begin reading some of her selections on her own and narrating to me afterward. I’m hoping to prepare Makenna to work more independently toward the end of the year when Maya will start more formal lessons like her sisters.
Around 11:30 the girls help put lunch in the oven—we eat our main meal in the middle of the day—and I beg Charlie to watch Sesame Street, just for a little while!
Today during lunch the girls each pick a poem to read and we listen to our hymn (this month’s is Amazing Grace) and practice skip counting by threes (3, 6, 9… oh, you already know that part). Then there’s clean up and we get dad off to work. Today we added our pressed leaves to our nature journal and even identified one tree using our big book of trees (not its technical name). Then there is DEAR Time (Drop Everything and Read). I’m reading Little House in the Big Woods to Madison and Maya and Makenna is still working through the Hobbit. I offered to read some of it to her today and she declined. Apparently it takes too long when I read.
Other options for afternoon activities include artist study, composer study, handicrafts, Book of Centuries, nature walks, and/or recorder lessons—the goal being to work in all of these activities once a week.
That brings us to 2:30/3:00ish—Go Outside and Play!
In case you’re wondering, dinner is at 5:30 (sandwiches and fruit—or Las Frutas as Makenna learned today) at which time we prepare what we can of the next day’s lunch. Bath time is at 7:00. By eight Charlie’s tucked into bed and the girls and I do a little more reading (our current selection: The Never Ending Story). At this point I should add that the girls have been surprisingly helpful with meal prep, helping me maintain the house, and with Charlie. Makenna especially is really stepping in when she sees one of her siblings in need of help and I’m not readily available to do it myself. And I can’t stress this last point enough; I could never do this without dear husband kicking kids back into play, reading and patiently listening to narrations, fishing books or puzzle pieces out of the Great Dane's mouth, chaning diapers when necessary, and talking me down when I get too high strung—all before he heads off to work.
Finally, lights out is between 8:30 & 9:00.
And then we start it all over again.
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