Adjusting & New Rhythms

Every once in a while something happens in your life that makes you lose your rhythm. For me and homeschooling, that was Ezra's arrival. I know there are homeschooling moms who don't miss a beat when a new baby arrives but that was not the case over here! Our routines were out the window with dad being off work quite a bit (HUGE blessing), the holidays, and oh yeah, this little dude who everyone is obsessed with but hates to be set down. Especially given that we didn't have much notice about him (5 days!) and that I was gone for 12 days to bring him home, everyone's adjustment and emotional situation was just a little rocky and we needed some time to come together as a family and just have fun during a difficult time. So we did. And that's the beauty of homeschooling. It's all here waiting for us when we felt up to tackling it again.

Unfortunately, when I did feel up to tackling it again it didn't work as smoothly as it did back when we started in August. We had such a great rhythm for those beautiful three months. But now things changed and it took me a bit to figure out that I needed to change too.

So what changed and how does it look now?

Well, I needed the kids to be a little more independent. I love working one on one with them (and still do!) but I needed to be able to walk away for a minute without them coming to a screeching halt.
We achieved this by:
- Increasing fun workbooks
- Increasing simple games
- Increasing selective technology**

**J has been doing this reading app (Kids Learn to Read - has a turtle 'coach') that has really been helping with some specific troubles we were having {blending sounds} and so he does that about twice a week for fifteen minutes a time. I'm generally super, super against technology for kids but this has been really great.

I also needed to work with J and M together more to capitalize on the focused time I have.
We achieved this by:
- Increasing games
- Doing basic work together and then keeping J and extra bit of time to expand on the topic

I also found that I needed to go into the day more prepared and less spontaneously. 
This was achieved by laying out the work the night before.

Finally, our home had to change because Cyrus wants to read with us now but I'm usually baby-wearing and we only had a love seat in our main living room which was just leading to a LOT of arguments over "who is touching who too much" so we swapped it with a long couch we had elsewhere in the house and voila! Problem solved. We also used a baby gate to fence off the school area so I can lay things out but Cyrus can't get into everything. It's easy to overlook things like this but it actually makes a big difference.

I also had to let go of a few things for the time being (amazing science experiments and really messy sensory play) - the science experiments are tricky and time sensitive so we're just watching the video that demonstrates them all that came with our curriculum. Sensory play is great but when the baby needs to be fed...the mess can't just be left out and sometimes cleaning up three kiddos from sensory play just plain takes too long. So right now that is on hiatus unless dad is home to help. I expect this to be much simpler in the summer when we can just make a huge mess outside!

So, here is what it's looking like right now:

J's work set out for the morning. He has (top to bottom, left to right), say-spell-create the word, letter tracing, phonics exercise sheet, roll-the-dice one-to-one correspondence number finding snow-globe game, a couple tracing exercises, and dot to number math pages. 

This (obviously) doesn't include our read-aloud material (Bible, history/literature, science)

M has a similar set up with tracing pages, letter practice, dot to number math, the same roll-the-dice one-to-one correspondence number finding snow-globe game, and on top, the phonics exercise sheet. She also joins us for our read-alouds but sometimes leaves early on the history/literature and science.

I made this after seeing something similar online - took 3 minutes :)

These are pulled out of a tracing book from Barnes & Noble - they adore them

So there you go! That's what homeschool is looking like right now. They usually start working on what I have set out while I make them breakfast and I help them as needed. It gets at least this much done in a day and then we always do lots of reading throughout the day so no matter what the day brings we're getting something done!