A Work in Progress: Schooling, Teaching, figuring this thing out.

We're already a whole month into the new year and I haven't told you all the things I want to tell you.

So I'm going to dive right in, and keep it short.

They warned me that homeschooling would leave little time for housework. I didn't believe them at first. As difficult as I have always found the housework, I was sure I would be able to do both. After all, I'm only teaching one child at the moment.

More than a semester in, I still haven't figured out how to include the four year old in what the six year old and I are doing. I haven't figure out how to decide when to take a day off, and when not to. Schooling, like parenting, is a work in progress.

This particular morning, I know I'm not ready for our math lesson. But it's a tremendous thing for me to know that in advance, rather than finding it out at the last minute with lesson immanent. It's also a tremendous thing for me to know that I have twenty minutes between my first and second sessions to get math ready.

Because I've divided our work day into sessions.

• Michael has his own assignments for session one while I continue to prepare for my day.
• My first session involves CC materials, i.e., timeline, science, English, and history sentence.
• Second session includes a lesson from Saxon math; reading and dictation from Story of the World, Volume One: Ancient Times; and reading and dictation from another, child-selected story or book. Parker, being six, dictates something he remembers from the story to me, not the other way around, and I record it for him, then have him read it back to me.
• Third session has a lesson from First Language Lessons, and anything else I think we need to cover at that time.

There are other books and workbooks we use, such as for spelling and phonics, but I've started alternating those with Story of the World, since I only read from it two to three times a week. I keep it simple because this is our first year and he's not ready to settle down for long stretches at a time. Parker gets three breaks between sessions, and each one is limited to twenty minutes.

So far this is working better than anything else I have tried. There is structure, but it is not a confining structure.

It's time for me to teach.