We've pretty much never kept a "typical" homeschool schedule. When the children were little and even middle ages I tried to go with teachable moments and hit when the attention spans were high or the interest was there. Then we got a little older and co-ops kept the weeks from being the typical Monday-Friday homeschooled, weekends free. We used Saturday as a homeschool day the year and a half we participated in co-ops. During Christmas- New Years time we did some math and watched some educational DVDs on the holiday week and weekend. Then last week we finally had a Monday-Friday week with only a half day skiing as an extra. I have found that the kids and I would both like to try typical weeks now so I decide to start trying to get into that sort of routine. We hadn't had a real weekend before the first Monday of the year though as we'd done some science experiments and reading aloud on Saturday. Soooo, this past weekend after a full week, we took off both weekend days. Saturday morning the kids were asking me if we were going to do any work. I said no it's the weekend. They asked again on Sunday and got the same reply. Then today, Monday, they went straight to the fun stuff and I had to call them back and say we've got some lessons first, it's Monday! We will get used to this, if we decide to stick with a traditional schedule, it just might take some time!
Today didn't go all that well, I don't know why. We felt rushed even though there was no need to rush. I felt rushed anyway. All kids needed a lot of my help having all had something new in math. That doesn't happen too often that everyone has something they have never encountered before all on the same day, as they are all in different levels of math. The math goblins conspired to have it so this day though so I was hopping from kid to kid to kid to kid dealing with perimeters and ordinals and percents to decimals....
After math and LA I was glad to put on the next video lesson in the Teaching Company world history course and take a breather. I have reviewed our USA history course for this year but not yet the world history, I will get to that at some point. The basis for the older kids is the TC high school level world history (it does seem to be suitable for middle school ages too with some extra explanations).
Only a couple kids had specific science for today so we had time before I had to cook lunch. I played the first "Getting Ahead Primary Science" DVD for the kids. It was about animal babies with some info about habitats and adaptations. It was super cute but there was one thing I didn't like at all! The narrator was speaking in a jokey tone, probably meant to appeal to young kids as these are geared towards ages 7-10, and he used the words stupid and another not so nice word (forgot now it may have been dumb or idiot!) a few times. Such as pretending to be a young fox he said I will catch that stupid rabbit he isn't camouflaged very well. In all I think I counted only 3-4 instances of these words but still there was no need. These are geared to a young audience and are meant to be educational. I will carry on with viewing this series since none of the other science topics would likely lend themselves to this type of narration. I do want to point it out though. I felt these few words took away from the professionalism of these DVDs. It just wasn't something I expected in a "school" type DVD.
I heard about a monthly art class and mentioned it to the children, they all shouted a resounding NOOOOOO. Some people need to de-school, we need to de-co-op before they will want to take any classes they perceive as school like again.
The rest of the day was lunchtime, our big meal of the day, bringing in wood, fighting with the wood stove. Bobby altered it this weekend by adding a grate and I don't think it works very well now. I'm not sure if he's going to try something else. He was trying to make it easier to clean out the ashes but the wood doesn't seem to burn as well up on a grate with all the ashes and still glowing embers dropping through. Then I had to hand wash some shirts which is a major pain. The washing machine is STILL not working. We have trouble with water using appliances in the winter since our kitchen and the cellar underneath is the coldest part of the house, things freeze up. Wayyyyy back before Christmas and even before the power outage something went wrong with the washing machine after the plumbing had frozen. Unfortunately we still haven't figured out what is wrong and why the washer isn't working right. It won't drain or spin even when we make sure nothing is frozen on it. So now I'm stuck hand washing items and drying them near the wood stove. I really do not like doing this at all! I would never make it as a pioneer.
So there was the afternoon gone. The kids are working on pinewood derby cars since it's almost that time again. We did animal care and watched the Suite Life On Deck, which is a funny TV show. It's terribly cold outdoors, nobody wanted to play in the snow. It did snow quite a bit more over the weekend about a foot of new snow I think.
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