Redemption

After a few difficult days last week in homeschool, I vowed to be more creative and help my kids enjoy their work a little more. I think the major problems that we encountered had to do with requiring too much focused time and not enough "recess" or down time, especially for Hyrum. I thought of a bunch of short, fun activities that I could do with Hyrum between core classes and determined to do better this week. 

I was so happy with how everything went! We would do 20 minutes of math and then play a game. Next, we would do our Language Arts, and then do a small engineering/art project. We did this pattern throughout the week, and Hyrum was totally engaged the whole time. He worked harder during his lessons, and even with the added activities, we were done at the exact same time as we had been previously because of the lack of frustration and having to fight him on everything. It was a total win! I also tried to change things up a bit with the lessons. For example, he gets annoyed with too much writing, so I let him use dry erase markers to write his spelling words and sentences on the window. He thought it was the coolest thing ever and didn't even realize he was doing his writing for the day. The other boys had the option to join us for the activities or keep working to get finished quicker. That arrangement worked well for everyone.

Christian: This week Christian started reading "The Swiss Family Robinson" for Language Arts. He got to choose any book he wanted, so I encouraged him to choose a classic, rather than his normal fantasy books. He seems to be enjoying it so far! He is making good progress in all of his classes and should be done with them well before the end of the semester. By far, his hardest class is Secondary Math 3. Since he is already 2 years advanced in math, we expected that it would be challenging, but he is handling it well. That is the one class that he finds hard to do without a real teacher, but luckily, he has a dad who can handle whatever is thrown his way. Jonathon will sit down with Christian each night and help him with math. Statistics is Jonathon's specialty, so Christian is getting through this chapter without too many problems.

Andrew: One of the coolest things about Andrew's schedule is that he has Portuguese as an elective. We have been working very hard to make sure that the boys keep up their Portuguese so that if they return to the dual immersion program next year, they will be at the same level as their classmates. This requires a lot of effort on our part, but it has been such a wonderful family project. Every day after dinner, we spend 30 minutes going over our Talkbox.mom lessons as a family. Right now we are learning about food and how to ask for things we want. Andrew and Jonathon are already very good, but the rest of us are making some good progress. After our lesson, we read our scriptures (the children's Book of Mormon reader) together in Portuguese. I have grown to love this time of our day. The kids also do 20-30 minutes of Duolingo on the computer each day, so I'm hopeful that our whole family will be able to speak and understand enough of the language that we will feel comfortable when we go to Portugal for Jonathon's sabbatical in a year and a half.

Hyrum: For Marine Biology this week, we had two awesome lessons! The first one was about marine reptiles. I taught a fun hands-on lesson about the characteristics of reptiles, and then Miurvy taught the kids how to make their own stuffed animal sea turtles. She is a sewing teacher, so she knew exactly how to help the kids sew them. She taught two very basic stitches, and they were all able to make them by themselves. The kids loved it! Hyrum was especially in love with his cute little turtle and is determined to make more little animals to add to his collection. 

 

The next lesson was on fish. We talked about how they school together for protection, food, and socialization. Miurvy tied little bows of yarn on each child's wrist so all the kids were connected in a long chain. She then had them go around the yard to find food (candy, nuts, granola bars, etc.) Their little "school" had to find the food together, make sure that everyone was happy with what they got, and stay in a group so they didn't break the yarn. It was so fun and engaging.

I know that there will be more challenging days in the future, but this week reminded me how much I enjoy homeschool and all the cool things we get to do as a family. It felt good to have some redemption after my errors of the previous week.