Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

A couple of days ago, I tried writing an entry that would explain all the changes we’ve made in the last month – new books, new schedule, new co-op, new friends – but those kinds of posts are excruciatingly boring, both to write and to read. So instead I’ll just say that things are working much better now. It’s like everything just suddenly fell in to place. Only they didn’t of course because there are still a lot of things I’d like to see change, but we’re making slow and steady progress, and that is enough to celebrate.

We were really rockin’ last week. Seriously, you wouldn’t believe it. D was up every morning and at her work by 8:30. She was finished by 10:30 and experienced that rush of relief and freedom that comes when you have crossed off all the things on your to do list and your time is your own. We read poetry and current events, she discovered that math can be fun (!) and that she is capable of figuring a lot of it out on her own, we planned a field trip, went to Excel and to the unschool park day… it was decidedly our most rewarding week so far all year. And all of this while I’m on a sugar fast.

Then everything went to hell with daylight savings. I HATE daylight savings. I sometimes think it must be an evil plot against families with small children, devised by some bitter, barren monster. As if getting kids on a regular sleeping schedule isn’t hard enough without throwing a bi-annual time change into the mix. Without fail, no matter if we’re springing forward or falling back, our kids can’t fall asleep at night, are up throughout the night (even more than usual) and awake at some ungodly our. Except for D who now wants to sleep until noon.

I’m playing with the idea of switching of nights and mornings with P but that idea is pretty impractical right now. My magic thinking now revolves around finding the perfect schedule and sticking to it. If we were all up at the same time, eating breakfast at around the same time, stretching, doing morning chores together and then sitting down to work at the kitchen table, then life would suddenly be perfect. We would get twice as much work done, and we would all whistle while we did our chores, or listen to audio books, our sleep would be regulated and the children wouldn’t fight anymore, and everyone including P will be so impressed with us and come to me for advice… all if I could just make myself wake up at the same every morning. Regardless of how late I was up the night before with the baby or how many times she woke to nurse. Realizing the impracticality of that right now, my magical thinking shifts to the future. “When the baby is weaned,” I tell myself, then we’ll be able to do this homeschooling thing properly. My God, why is it so incredibly difficult for me to just stay in today and to work with what I have?

Finally!

I get to tag something as a success!

Up until today, I have only been assigning D the chapter review questions in her math book, with a few cumulative reviews thrown in for good measure. That means that in the last two weeks, she has moved through something like six chapters in her math book (this isn’t the success part). We didn’t start at the beginning of the book because it was all review, so we are now on chapter 14. I’m not sure this is the most effective way to go about learning math, but if she understands the concepts it seems silly to make her do a million practice problems. We use the Calculadder drills everyday to improve her ability to add, subtract, multiply, and divide quickly and I’m hoping that will make the other math work easier in the long run.

Kelli tipped me off about Calculadder and I am so glad she did! It makes so much sense, at least for where we are at now. Actually, I wish I had been given drills like these as a kid. I still struggle with my multiplication tables and division always seemed like such a chore. D has just recently started complaining that they’re boring, but Calculadder would be the last thing to go in our tiny little arsenal of “curriculum”. They seem like so much fun to me, I think I might start doing them with her. I could sure use the practice and she loves the company and the competition. When she told me that they were getting boring (she’s been working on the same two lessons for two weeks now and can’t get them done under two minutes, which is the time she has to beat to move on the next lesson) I responded that I think that’s the point. They are supposed to get boring, which in turn is supposed to motivate her to get them done faster. When Doug was here he told us that he got so sick of them that he finally memorized the answers and could do each drill in less than 30 seconds.

Today’s chapter was on Units of Measurement. (Meters and liters and grams, oh my!) I hated measuring as a kid. Still have to think a while to remember the difference between mass and volume. I looked at the chapter review and knew we were going to have to take it one lesson at a time. So we sat down on the floor together – me, D, and elle – and we started going through it. She was pretty aloof at first, but when we got to volume I suddenly remembered the cuisenaire rods I had purchased the day we decided to homeschool (every homeschooler needs cuisenaire rods, right?!) and suddenly we were having lots of fun. We put aside the book – I even put aside my agenda! – and we just played. It was awesome. I just knew those little wooden blocks were going to come in handy.

It’s Monday.

The week is off to an auspicious start. I didn’t even have the schedule written down until late this morning. Received quite a bit of flak for the quote I chose for her to memorize, but managed to keep my cool both then AND when she called me in to help her with a math review problem she didn’t understand. Very hard to do when she’s bouncing all over the place, adamant that the book didn’t explain it and that I’m not making sense. I kept telling myself to breath, to be compassionate, to keep it light hearted when what I wanted to do SO BADLY was to tell her to sit still and listen, God damn it! I was so proud of us when I was finally able to come up with a real world example for her and she was finally able to sit still long enough and pull the cotton out of her ears and really hear it. For us to come out of a situation like that without either of us loosing our temper is pretty remarkable.

It almost made up for the guilt I’m heaping upon myself for not making more of the fact that this is an election year. A really good home schooler would have developed all sorts of fascinating projects and lessons and field trips and simulations, but not me. Nope. I’m pretty sure that the only thing we’ve really spent any time on regarding the election was to sit down together tonight and watch the SNL Presidential Bash. Does laughing together hysterically at Tina Fey count as a lesson?

On a completely unrelated note, I am still lurking on the unschooling Yahoo! group. I’ve decided that maybe they are not all as crazy as I originally thought. More to come later…