This Homeschooling Life #17

I’m a little late to posting this, as last week was the first Monday of the month.But better late than never, and I needed last week to get myself ready to even think about a new year let alone doing anything about it. December didn’t see much in the way of homeschooling – though of course, in reality, there was lots of learning as it happens all the time. Even while it felt like we were caught in life events and Christmas and not sitting down with anything to show for it, the kids were always busy and learning. We read our book club book {Skellig}, we did some more art classes on Creative Bug, there were crafts a plenty, lots of baking, stories, meet ups and probably a whole load more that I can’t even recall.

Lola went back to school in the middle of last week, so this is our ‘back-to-normal’ week. Not having Lola around in the daytimes is feeling more normal, and we’ve started to find our new rhythms. While becoming a family of five hasn’t made a huge change in our day to day routine, I have to be a little more set in what we’re doing as obviously it is just me with the kids, and I have to fit in my work as well as looking after them/homeschooling stuff. Beastie seems to have dropped his afternoon nap, which is when I’d usually work, so I’ve been re-jigging things around a little.

The girls decided they’d like to add in another home ed group, we’d only been attending one lately, so now we’ve gone back to one we used to attend, and so far they’re all loving it. this means one week we have two days out at groups, buytramadolmed.com then a full week at home. So I’ve made a rough two-week timetable, giving us just a little bit of structure to our weeks. Factoring in a little set Maths and English time each week, some art and project time, a couple of dedicated work afternoons for me and, most importantly, some time with nothing planned. Free time is something I’ve relished for myself lately, and seen how good it is for all of us, so I’ve made a point of not trying to fill every single minute of the days.

The girls are carrying on with 10Ticks for their maths, as it seems to work pretty well for us, and I like having something that doesn’t need any forward planning on my part. I’ve just re-subscribed both of them to Reading Eggs as well – Kiki used Reading Eggspress and it’s great for some extra reading and comprehension work. Again, it’s something they can get on with by themselves, and doesn’t need any planning or organising. I’m trying to keep things as simple as I can f, not overloading myself with too much.

We’ll be reading another book for book club this month, adding in plenty of art time – we’re about to start a Lisa Congden creative boot camp over on Creative Bug, and listening to some more ‘Story of the World’. My middle two both really love making lapbooks, so I’m planning on letting them pick a topic and we’ll make that our project over the next few weeks.

After a bit of a lost few months at the end of last year, I’m excited to get back on track this year!