Musings of a Mentor

Jun. 7, 2006

What a Strange Day!

It starts about 7am like most days. The kids who are coming to study begin arriving around 8:30am. During the summer my normal crowd of 25 students drops, and this week it is even lower because so many are on vacation. By 9am I have one 9 yr old, six 14 yr olds, two 15 yr olds and one 16 year old.

The 16 yr old is working on compiling a portfolio that shows his last two years of study. No matter how many times I tell them to keep their work filed, or in neat binders, they don't. So, he is redoing many of the labs, posters, projects, and essays "to prove" to a highschool admissions councilor what he has learned. He is doing all this so he can play football. While I disagree with his decision, I am being supportive and lending a sympathetic ear to his woes.

The 9 yr old, one of the 14 yr olds and one of the 15 yr olds sit down with me to work on three different tasks. The 9 yr old is doing math, the 14 yr old is building a Latin Grammar notebook, and the 15 yr old is learning to streamline her writing. Two of the 14 yr olds begin working on their Hebrew lessons with my dh. The rest of the kids go up to do intensive math with my mom.

After about an hour, those doing Hebrew go on up to math, a couple come down from math, and the ones who were with me were ready for a break. So, we go downstairs to watch a little bit of the National Spelling Bee that I had saved on the DVR. At first they thought it was corny, but soon really got into it. After about 30 minutes we paused the recording and had our own spelling bee. They asked all the root and definition questions and had a blast.

At this point most of them broke up into individual work... one was working a short story, one was working on art, one went back to editing her writing with me, a couple broke off to read together, and a few who hadn't done any math yet went upstairs to do their lessons. Sometime in there they all ate lunch too.

At 12pm six of them left with my mom for a community service project. I started doing phonograms and dictation with the 9 yr old. The other two girls still here were working on typing essays. When the 9 yr old and I finished, the older girls and I started vocabulary.

Then one of those amazing teaching moments happened about 2pm when it was just two girls and myself in the house and we went from boycott to the Wisdom of Solomon. We had an inpromptu reading from the Wisdom of Solomon for almost an hour.

By 3pm the other kids got back and they all asked to watch the rest of the Spelling Bee. So we did, we were all trying to spell the words before they showed them at the bottom of the screen. We missed a lot more than we got right, but as soon as the kids saw the words they knew WHY the words were spelled that way. When they saw the root words they knew them. I thought that was really cool!

The kids were all gone by 4pm. The last mom to pick up her son is a great friend of mine. She and I talked about so many things today-- mostly good books, writing and computers. We looked at the clock and it was after 5:00, we had been talking for over an hour! We do that often.

Then I made a simple dinner, logged on and read through my email, posted on my favorite website, watched Good Eats, then sat down to write about this wonderful day. I hope all of you had a wonderful day too!

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Jun. 16, 2006 - Hi

Posted by TRINITYPREPSCHOOL

Come on over and vote in my summer homeschooling poll.

Blessings on your day,
Maureen

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I hope my blog inspires dreamers to dream big and leaves wisdom seekers a little wiser. :)