Posted in Schoolday Doings
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We're getting into our fall rhythm, I think. So here's what a homeschool day at the Red Sea School is starting to look like: Get Victoria ready for preschool, DH will take her. Get Violet up and out of bed -- not an easy task! By 8:30 or so we are usually ready to start school. Today it was math -- the 8s on the times table. After the agony of long division ("I know the answer, I just don't know how I know the answer!") it is good to do something easy. Next, history. Violet decided to start at the beginning of our Story of the Word Middle Ages to the Renaissance book now that our RenFest prep is done. So, we read about how Rome began to fall apart because it was too big to defend from all the "barbarians." We also learned that the Celts painted themselves blue and use animal fats to gel up their hair into spikes to prepare for battle. Would scare me! After we read -- I do this as a read-aloud, just for fun and variety's sake -- we do our narration. Sometimes I take dictation, sometimes Violet types. Today I had her do a do-over, which I would almost never do. But her sentences were mainly constructed of exclamation points and words stretched out for emphasis, like reaaaaallllllyyyyyyy, which is super annnnnnoooooyyyyyinnnnngggg. Right? And since the day was going well I decided to push her on it. She still insisted on trying to be funny -- including a genuinely clever pun on "Pax Romana" and "the pox" -- but I felt a little more certain that she had been paying attention. I let Violet take a short Neopets break (10 minutes) while I did some straightening, then we took Pupster for a short walk around the neighborhood to get some sunshine for all of us. Then we came back in and Violet did Rosetta Stone Chinese for 15-20 minutes, until it was time to go pick up Victoria from preschool. Quick jaunt to Target to get new bike helmets for both girls, a new ball (Pupster keeps attacking them), and a giant frisbee. Then our nanny comes -- let's see, she needs a screen name, let's call her Mary (as in the ultimate nanny, Mary Poppins). So Mary sets up a picnic for the girls on the lawn, then they take scooters and trike and toys to the park for the rest of the afternoon (stopping briefly at our neighborhood coffee/ice cream shop for a treat). Girls return at 5 pm. Violet still has a bit of Chinese to do, but she is begging to play the Sims. We agree that after she finishes Chinese she can do Sims while I make dinner. In the meantime Victoria is dying to try the new Dora the Explorer PlayDoh set I got in a moment of weakness, so we set it up, and she dutifully ignores my admonition about mixing the colors and does what children are born to do, and begins mushing them all togther. Dinner is running late. I let Victoria watch some PBS kids and Violet plays Sims for entirely too long. We have dinner (a penne/chicken sausage/broccoli thing I had doubled and frozen a few days back), then Victoria has a bit more time with the playdoh while I load up the dishwasher and DH gets Violet to practice the piano with the metronome -- a hated task, for understandable reasons. Playing with the metronome is hard! But she is a trooper, and she is really getting good at both keeping with the ticker and getting back on track quickly if she falters. And then on to bed. Though I'm pretty sure that Advanced Sneak Reading is going on more often than I realized. Some days we have no nanny, some days -- like tomorrow -- we have a class or homeschool playgroup or field trip. So there is no real typical day, just a series of related adventures, punctuated by trips to the coffeeshop and too much Web Boggle. |
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Posted by Anonymous
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