Today I woke up to COLD!! (OK, you can read about that on my other blog.)  Suddenly I had the desire to skip school and just stay in bed all day.  After all, it's rainy, cold . . . who wants to do school today?  Hmmm . . . how to get out of school today? 

Then I remembered that when I was in school we had occasional days, like Field Day . . . or Sock Hop day . . . or days for holiday parties.  We took days to do something different in school didn't we?  Nobody felt guilty about that . . . especially the teachers!  I also remembered a day several years ago, much like today, a day the boys and I spent the day playing educational games, reading, telling each other stories, and "learning" in very different but only fun ways.  The boys LOVED it, and so did I.  No papers to grade.  No lesson plans to follow.  Impulsiveness to fill my tank.  But we were still "doing school."

I felt a few minutes of guilt.  No, we have to do school today.  We have to follow the plan.  After all, we're finally clicking along, and it took us weeks to get moving.  Back and forth my mind went between what I wanted to do, and what I thought the government and critical onlookers would say if they saw we were having yet another week without five full days of lesson plans and written work.  Then I stopped myself, and asked, what is the point?  As I educate the boys, what is my purpose?  To learn of course.  And I remembered that a day of learning games, reading, playing educational computer games IS learning.  And it is also like a vitamin B shot to our educational program, putiing some life into our work.

So today we will:

• only do lessons that HAVE to be done (for Josh that means co-op assignments to keep up with his assignments)
• wipe the dust off of some of the fun educational games I have on my shelves (if we can get to my shelves . . . but that's another post.)
• play at Starfall, check out some links from our Usborne Internet linked books, and maybe do some "surfing" on some of the subjects we are studying or just want to find out more about (so they can see that Internet searches--which they cannot do on my computers without me, incidently--are for more than writing papers)
• read without feeling guilty for having to put the book down to do something else (we started a great book on Rembrandt yesterday that was longer than I had time to finish, and Mom was really learning something from it!)
• play with the baby without guild (hmmm . . . maybe we'll do some Internet research on her . . . )
• stay in our pajamas (don't you just love those days?)
• work on our respective books or articles (each of the older boys is writing one, and I have an e-newsletter deadline next week)
• start a new blog?  Josh? maybe?  (would love to hear opinions on letting a 12-year-old have a blog)
• laugh (a little more than we do over math homework)
• have fun while we learn
• not say, "I hate school!" all day

Gee . . . maybe I'll even take some pictures.