Saturday, September 24, 2005

Slowly getting there!

Yesterday was one of the best days in a while. But, I didn't follow my usual expectation of spending considerable amounts of time on language and math. We started the day going through what kinds of things would be in a travel brochure (the kids are going to create travel brochures for planets--they have to be as factual as possible!), then we spent some time on music, then our week-end cleaning, then we went out for lunch and a movie (ds' birthday party).

That little inner voice has been nagging me for some time that I should be doing more cultural work with them--science, music, etc. I know that it's the main key to helping the children develop fully, as these areas captivate them so much and get them naturally involved in the language arts and math skills which are so important to living in this society. I think I've been too engrained by traditional education to worry about the language arts and math and have not been looking at the WHOLE child. Yesterday was a great eye opener for me.

Saturday, September 10, 2005

One week done

It was a struggle this week. Part of me thought we could just sort of continue from where we'd left off. I shouldn't have been so naive! We needed to resume good routines, have lots of group stuff... I didn't have my meeting with the 11yo as I had planned and I think that definitely didn't help things. We will have our meeting Monday morning.

Good things from the week: some work got done, the idea of using the tablecloth has been working well, the kids have been quite good at picking up after themselves, not sure what else.

Things to work on or things learned: I must practise lessons before I give them instead of the winging I did for one; I need to have more group time and group lessons, especially to make sure that our activities from Building Moral Intelligence and Raising a Thinking Preteen get done (it's basically grace and courtesy stuff, but in a different way).

I know that part of the problem was that one of the kids was away for the week, so I wasn't totally willing to get started with the cultural lessons and the read-aloud. I'll have to plan things out, and practise things as necessary, for next week.