If at first you don't succeed....

try, try again - so they say.

So we have tried in the past for KM to set her own schedule and it really didn't work out all that well past the first day or two. She did get the swing of getting her things done daily when I gave her a list and the freedom to complete things as she wanted, but it seemed like everytime we tried for more than that it just wouldn't work. She would become overwhelmed and feel like she needed more structure.

Our summer session begins next week and we are trying it again . This time, after some simple instruction and guidance on how to use the Homeschool Tracker, KM has set her own schedule up. We both agreed that this would be the perfect time to try it out because we have far fewer pressing time constraints, places to be at specific times, a lighter lesson load and we are already adjusting to changes in the house, so this can just be another one of those adjustments that should hopefully be all worked out by the fall.

She is very excited about the programs that she will be doing over the summer and feels that she has set things up in a way that makes sense and won't be overwhelming for her to handle in her own way. Here is the schedule that she came up with.

There are no actual guidelines for "timing" other than getting things done on those days and/or within reason. Like if she knows that she wants to go to the beach on Tues, she may want to do a little extra math on Monday so that she can have less to do that day. 

Here is an example of one weeks assignments -

Her assignments are quite short so she can easily bump them around here and there with little problem. I really think this will be helpful in her managing her time in a constructive way so that she feels as though things are flowing.

Her program choices for the summer include

• beginning a year long Shakespeare Study
• Math & The Cosmos - a Duke Tip program
• an overview of U.S. Government, Economics and Citizenship
• Keyboard Level 2B
• Beginning French with some online and computer games
• CNN Student News for Current Events
• Some more advanced Nutrition study - including cooking and baking
• Bowling Camp, Swimming, Basketball and Dance for P.E. 

Some thoughts on Summer

It feels like summer these last few days, but I can't wait for the real thing, the lazy, lounging days of summer that come once "school" is out. Not our learning path - we home educate year round - but when the schooled kids get out for summer vacation almost all organized home learning events, from co-ops to park days, seem to come to a screeching halt, as we begin to wait for "them" to head back into the schools and leave the playgrounds, beaches, libraries and museums to us again in September.

WHY is this? Well I can't speak for all home learners, but for us it is an aversion to crowds, rowdy ill managed groups of people, broken and mistreated exhibits, parents yelling and threatening their children, and a general discontentment from all forms of staff at said outings - from volunteer exhibit workers to life guards to cranky ice cream scoopers.

It seems as though school gets out and EVERYONE GOES CRAZY!!! Generally the first few weeks are okay, but by the time Independence Day rolls around, they have had enough. I honestly think that the stores are do these parents a favor by having their back to school sales begin so early - IT GIVES THEM A GLIMPSE OF HOPE!

I didn't understand it when I was sending her back - every year my heart would break. Now that I don't it is even harder for me to fathom why people would have children and then long to be away from them for such extended periods of time, they miss so much of their day to day life that they hardly know their children. They get two or three standard answers to their questions with little to no insight into their actual events.

I not only love my daughter, I LIKE my daughter. I enjoy being with her. I am thrilled to experience new things with her. I have fun playing with her - that's right I PLAY with my teenager and not just video games. I know and like her friends. I am very happy to say that none of us would want it any other way. Cheers to a relaxing and peaceful summer! 

Shifting Ground

I have always loved this Peter Simpson painting - shifting ground. This is also what is going on around here lately. We are in the midst of some big transitions, all for the better of our family. DN has been visiting more and more lately, so we are trying to find the balance of the new flow within our home. Trial and error, along with lots of cleansing, discussion and asking for guidance! It will take some time, but I am sure it will eventually all work itself out!

KM is moving swiftly through her summer lessons and will be completed in the next two weeks. I decided to have a lighter load year and I have rearranged our schedule a bit for the fall which will allow for a good deal of creative, spiritual, family and social time ~ not that we didn't have this before, but it has felt as though we still needed to add some more. We will be adding a lot of yoga and meditation time into our routines, as well as learning some more about energy and alternative healing methods - which I will be sure to post more on as this all comes to fruition.

I have been getting lots of questions and I am trying my best to keep up with them, so please forgive me if I am slow to return your emails or reply to comments.

It's August ALREADY!

I just set up our white board calendar for the month and I CAN'T BELIEVE IT IS AUGUST!

We are midway through our summer session and things are going really well though I can't believe that I already wrote down "Not Back To School Day"- the day our local PS kids go back to school and the day we celebrate not! You can see previous posts about that here and here. I am also being bombarded with calls and questions about Not Back to School events and field trip planning from local homeschoolers.

I have all our lesson plans set for the rest of this session and all of next, so it should be pretty smooth sailing in that department. We have a lot going on this month and I anticipate that my posts may be slow or become more pics and less chatter...hmmm that might be a good thing for some!

How are you spending the rest of you summer? Any good plans, events, activities? Feel free to share....

Beach Days of Summer

During the summer we spend a lot of days by the pool and some at the pond, but the days that KM always seems to remember best are the ones we spend at the harbor with our extended family. In my grandparents family there were 12 siblings, so when I say extended, I mean extended. It always amazes me how most of these cousins don't see each other more than once maybe twice a year, but they talk about things that happened last year, or the year before, as if it was yesterday!

Besides getting to see each other, the best part for the parents is remembering playing with our cousins in the same way and being grateful that our children get have such a wonderful experience and make great memories!

Newest Experiment - Canning

I have been convinced by one of my very close friends to try canning some of the fruits and veg from my garden and grown locally during the season to save for the winter months. KM has been very enthusiastic in helping with this and we have had a great time experimenting with different recipes.

CJ's parents sent us up some peaches from South Carolina so we made some peach syrup and peach preserves.

We also made some raspberry jam and syrup last month from the berries that grow in our yard and I made a HUGE batch of baked beans from scratch - even used dried beans!!!

Once our tomatoes start turning red I will have some more to add with some sauces and salsas, but for now we have a nice little stock pile going...

The one thing that I am finding that I really still need to freeze though is the zucchini and squash. I slice them up in various measures - discs, matchsticks, and grates - and freeze them to use over the winter in breads, soups, stir fries and even quiches!

Air conditioned induced comas...

are happening quite frequently around here. The heat and humidity have been so intense that we put the air conditioners in this week for the first time in almost 4 years. The kids have been sleeping late and when awake can be found in the pool. Lessons started back up this past Monday and KM has been finding some shady spots outside to get her work done in between dips in the pool -

She has been getting things done very quickly and I have been thoroughly impressed! She actually seemed excited on Monday when she walked into the work room and to check her assignments for the day. I think she was getting a bit bored with the nothing planned month and honestly seems to be glad it is over. I think from now on we will stick with our two to three week breaks and not push it to the full month.

Changes...again...

We have been revamping how things work again!
~~~ BIG SURPRISE I KNOW~~~

The first thing is our vocabulary program - KM has been using Wordly Wise 3000 second edition, since I brought her home from PS last year, as she "really liked the way it was set up." Last year they had let her keep the workbook copy that she had started with and since it was a fairly inexpensive system and she did seem to be learning from it we kept it going this year. However over the last few lessons, I noticed that she was having more and more problems with the testing part of it. She just did not seem to be understanding the definitions, when they were taken out of the content of the book or if she couldn't check the definitions. You see the workbook is set up with the words and definitions listed at the beginning of each lesson, then through out the week you do one part each day Monday through Thursday and then you test on Friday. So I sat down with her and had her show me exactly HOW she goes about doing the work. What I found was that she was never actually "reading" through the definitions of the words, she had been taught/instructed by her PS teacher in 4th grade on how to figure out the answers to the different sections using different types of context and scanning clues. Great for building "TESTING" skills, but not so great for "VOCABULARY" skills. I spoke with CJ about this for awhile this afternoon and we have decided to scrap the Wordly Wise for the time being. I am by no means knocking the product at all. I really do like the way it is setup and the different approaches, but my daughter has been trained to cheat her way through it and that just seems like busy work to me. By the way on the test she doesn't have the definitions available and that is why she can't use the system that they taught her in order to pass this test, so I wonder how well those testing skills do actually work?

So in lieu of the Wordly Wise for vocab skills we have decided to try a few different things. For one I had gotten her the My Word Coach for the Wii for Christmas - before the price shot through the roof, guess people found out how great it is!! - so we are going to incorporate that in, as well as some really cool free sites I have found online for vocab building including -

1. Number2.com
2. Free Rice
3. Learning Vocabulary Fun
4. Prepme.com

We have started Ancient History and I think the outline that we have planned is going to work really well. The hands-on project booklets, lapbook sets and ancient science are going to tie the information from the textbook together really well. I downloaded the audiobooks of the Story of the World from our library network site and I think that as we get into each section I will introduce it by using one of the stories from the set. I am stressing to her that they are stories though. I know that many, many, many people have said that SOTW is a secular program and I get why they think that since it covers all religions. At the same time, in my opinion, the way they present the stories just doesn't feel right as a "History" curriculum. However the stories themselves are great little tidbits of "this is the type of stories that they told at this time" or "these are the things that they believed at that time." I will be sure to post pics as we get more into our ancient science and kits that we will be using.

We are also adding in some more math practice review days as she is starting to get into some unfamiliar territory. Each time she comes across a new concept I am shocked at how much I thought she had learned at PS, but she really never even touched on the subject. She is using the Teaching Textbooks Pre-Algebra as that is where she tested into in the system and she really likes how the system is set up, but it also assumes that you have a really good understanding of a lot of the basics and while she does in some areas she is REALLY lacking in others. At the moment we have taken a step back and are spending some extra time with percentages. These can be tricky little buggers and she just doesn't seem to want to follow all the steps in the process. She starts out fine and gets so close to the answer, but somehow gets tripped up on one or two steps. The weird part is that each time it seems to be different spots as well. So we will be taking this next week to reinforce the concepts with some hands on things and real-life math problems to see if I can get her to understand that completing ALL the steps is the only way to get the right answer. As I have said a gazillion times before, I really do not like to bash the school system, but they teach the kids that any answer is better than no answer. You see on the MCAS test they get points as long as they put something for an answer. If they leave an answer blank they get 0, but if they at least take a guess, even if it is the complete wrong answer, they get 1 point. If they take a guess and get the answer that is "almost" the right answer they get 2 or 3 points. If they get the right answer they get 4 points. ---hmmmm

I adore math! I always have and the 1 and only reason for that is that math is not a subjective topic. The answer is either right or wrong, even if you can have more then one solution to a problem ~ i.e. name a prime number that is less than 11 - the answer could be 1, 3, 5, or 7 ~ the answer that you give is either right or wrong. There is no arguing about it. There is no teacher saying that THEY don't interpret it that way. It is a truly black and white subject. So it baffles me that things like this are going on in our school system and I am having to retrain my daughter's brain.

When I started typing I never intended for this post to turn into another rant about the PS system - HONESTLY I DIDN'T! Since it has been a year out of that system I really should be beyond that by now - shouldn't I? But the more I am thinking about it, the more amazed I am that I am still discovering things about the system that I somehow missed when she was there. I also think that the scary part of that is that I was a very involved parent ~ I was even a substitute teacher for a while at the school and volunteered all the time ~ so how much are the uninvolved parents missing. The parents who barely have time to read through the mass of papers that come home from school or to check their kids homework. I am not saying that they all choose to be that way or making a judgement on them, but it is a little bit frightening to me to think that their kids are just being shuffled along and taught strategies to get through the test instead of being educating in order to be a productive and prosperous member of society.

I do apologize for the twisted route that this post has taken...I guess you just never know where you will end up once you start out -or what kind of changes you have to make along the way - so maybe I didn't get so far off topic as I thought I had!

Another Revamp ----

While I was traipsing around the blog-o-sphere last night I came across the post of a fellow homeschooling mom blogger Summer Fae - here - who had typed about her case of HMP - Homeschool Mom Panic!

This of course is the worst sort of mom panic, because your child's entire FUTURE rests in your meager little hands. There is no "awful teacher" to blame it on - except yourself - no "student peer pressure" to blame that behavior on - except those other children you have in your house - and no "school bus driver" who they picked up those bad road rage words from - I would never say those things!

Once you get past those wretched truths, you can soon come to realize that this is also the best sort of mom panic because you have total control over the situation - of course you may want to consult that co-principle that some of you have and then again you may not. You have the right to decide when, where, what and how your children are learning! The best part of homeschooling is that revamp policy that says "hey if it isn't working try something different or scrap it all together".

Here at GCK Homeschool we are working on an experiment in timing. We have found that trying to get KM to wake up, eat breakfast, brush her teeth and get ready to start her bookwork in the morning is just not worth the fight! It was getting to feel like we were back to the rush rush rush out the door feelings we used to have when she went to PS and I just don't have it in me to fight that battle anymore!

So instead, we are letting KM get out of bed and have breakfast at a leisurely pace. She has been watching some great Discovery Channel DVDs on the laptop during breakfast - presently she has been enjoying the Secrets of Archaeology Series which we got from the library. We then ease into our geography/holiday project we have been working on "Holidays Around the World" - pictures of that will be posted later in the week. We have been doing some yoga, silly games, exercises and chores after that, which brings us just about to lunch time. While I start lunch KM goes in and gets her daily estimation, daily writing, daily science question and Wordly Wise assignments done - which generally takes about 20-25 minutes to get done when she wants them to. During lunch we have been listening to audio books together - we just finished up the Redwall Collection by Brian Jacques, which is such a great story for audio books! After lunch we work on History, Science, Foreign Language, or whichever elective we have planned for that day. She has some free time in the afternoon, which she has been spending either on the computer or reading a lot lately. Then KM does her Teaching Textbooks assignment on her own in the later afternoon early evening.

Some days it feels like a lot or like the day is dragging on forever, but there are no fights in the morning to "get into gear" - CJ's favorite morning euphemism - and besides her daily things, she seems to be getting most of her other work done in 2 or 3 days instead of 5 - which is FINE by me! She seems to be much more able to focus and get things done when she hasn't been rushed into starting.

I don't know if this revamp will last forever and I am sure that it won't be our last, but I do know that at the moment it has calmed my HMP attacks quite a bit!

Me Time!

Two months ago I received my initiation in the First Degree of the Usui System of Reiki Natural. Since then I have tried several times to sit and go through the paperwork and books to prepare myself for the Second Degree training, but it seemed that every time something happened ~ the phone rang, SC woke up, KM needed help with something, the dryer buzzed - you know the inevitable something that causes every parent to not take time for themselves. This evening - after my sister called 5 seconds after I sat down with my books - I shut the ringer off, blocked out all other things and went over my notes.

I did not get anywhere near as much done as I would have liked, but it felt good to really engulf myself even for a few minutes in something other than next year's curriculum, pre-revolutionary America, 5th grade math or board books. It is often difficult to find time for oneself, but you have to or you are no good to anyone.

You must create a sanctuary for yourself, even if it is just a corner of your room, where you can recharge your own energy. Now this often means different things to different people ~ reading "girl" magazines, doing spa-at-home treatments, scrapbooking, meditating, listening to an audiobook, getting outside and being in the sunshine ~ but whatever your "thing" is, do it!

I have a meditation area in my room that is about 6 by 4 and nothing else is done in that area, but the thing is that I have not done any more than step through the area to grab a book in months! I must get back to my practice to balance things out again. I have bumped my yoga up to two classes a week, I am getting back to my regular daily yoga routine as well and I have scheduled my first shamantic-angelic-reiki session.

I am trying to remind myself on a daily basis that a burnt out mom - leads to a burnt out family!

There was also a quote within my notes that I felt compelled to share:
"Energy can only ground on the one who sends it out, and your job now, each one of you, is to measure carefully your own choices in interaction and step away from those who continue to participate in the darkness and negativity. Love, honesty, and kindness may now need to be tempered with a sense of finality when those in your life do not behave with honor, or choose to stay locked in negative behavior patterns. Justice is taken care of in the flow of energy itself, and will leave you free to move on to better days and wonderful new relationships when you make the choice to walk towards greater peace that you claim for yourself. Like attracts like." - Elaine Read-Cole

Feel free to share your ideas on how to recharge by leaving a comment!