Hope everyone had a wonderful holiday season and start to the new year. We eased back into homeschooling this past week. Josie got acquainted with a new speech and language therapist; we resumed violin lessons, and a bunch of other stuff that I can’t remember possibly also happened. Yep. The baby is a super crawler at seven-months and getting into everything — and starting to climb things.
Good grief.
Cutting his upper teeth too. Not a lot of sleep for me. I forget my own name sometimes.
Coffee. Coffee. Coffee.
Things have been very all-about-the-baby lately. Still we managed to work on some review work while I update the classroom.
He can even open drawers. *sigh*
What’s new with homeschooling Jeni?
I like how I feel the need to interview myself to stay on topic. Well. We began a morning basket routine each day (more on this later) including journaling at the dining room table. I love meeting together as a family to plan our day before we go our separate learning ways.
We also started our first grade Timberdoodle curriculum (more later on this too–promise); I am still getting a feel for workbooks and guided curriculum. We’ve been homeschooling for, what, four years now? It’s an adjustment. Not that I feel anything in Montessori is lacking, quite the opposite. Montessori pedagogically is in a word perfect for our family. Yet I want to have something extra that Josie can work on independently, and I’d already been eyeballing some of the included curriculums in their kits. Josie is making so much progress, but she’s definitely not at the same level as Mary and Michael, and I feel kinda devastated about leaving her behind. She is the oldest but makes such slow advances. Things I gotta work out emotionally… preferably over a cup of hot tea (while my coffee IV pumps life into my soul). Feel free to reach out if you’re experiencing this too. It feels like a small, lonely niche of us choosing to homeschool our kids with these unique challenges. But if that’s you too — you’re not alone!
As far as the other kids, the Montessori primary album easily matches a public school elementary K-5 program (at least from what I see based on Common Core), so I’m not worried about Mary or Mike being behind. Each new year we strongly consider putting the kids in public and / or private education. There are pros and cons. The pros always win. I love having my family at home — and they have after school activities with the same kids each day, so I get a lovely 2.5 hour break each afternoon while they get “socialized” because as you know, it is very hard to socialize a child while homeschooling.
I hope you did a spit take while reading that because obviously that’s a joke.
Anyway what did I feel good about this week? In addition to beginning a new therapy clinic and resuming violin lessons (with the world’s best Suzuki violin instructor), we started bullet journalling.
What is bullet journaling, and what does that look like with kids?
I will try to dive more in-depth when we really get into a groove, but basically it requires the kids to keep a calendar (with obvious benefits), and plan their work. The journal is blank, so they sketch out a square for each day, list their appointments and goals (ie work plan–we strive for a min of 3 items). The work plans we started at the beginning of the year were an excellent preparation for our new journals.
After we complete our three hour work period each morning (9-12) we have been rejoining at the table to reflect on our progress and write a sentence or two about how we did. I ask them to comment on what they accomplished: how they felt about their work, if they enjoyed it, what changes they would make. And so on. As they become stronger writers, this will become more than a sentence or two. But I love incorporating this Montessori concept with something kinda trendy at the moment; also it’s so artsy and creative. They cannot do it wrong, so to speak. So it’s a fantastic way to work on executive functioning skills (also handwriting and free writing for that matter). The benefits abound.
I started a bullet journal too but filled it in less than a month. I think severely ADHD people cannot keep a straight-forward and organized bullet journal. I have so many ideas. But maybe taking the 30 mins a day to work on it will help me too. Besides, the baby tore the bookmark from mine, so the perfectionist in me says, let’s start over from fresh with the kids. Build the time into our homeschool day.
Here’s a photo-dump per usual.
Baby being somewhat precocious but mostly adorable.
Classroom work (I was mostly reorganizing as they worked independently):
Tomorrow we will be at Josie’s regular 6 month cardio check-up. Prayers always appreciated!
Great post ! Thank you!
Where did you get the large bead frame paper from ?