Work Plans for the Week of December 9, 2013

We're back at school, more or less. I'd been hoping that after two weeks' vacation for Thanksgiving and travel, our school routine would feel good to get back to for everyone... and in some ways, it did. We were all happy to be at our regular Monday volunteer gig again (We taste-tested pomegranates! Marveled over the many uses of powdered egg! And discovered that crates of celery are, for some reason, about the heaviest things I've ever had to lift!), and the girls readily accepted my insistence that an afternoon sledding at the park means an evening at school (yet another reason to LOVE homeschool!), but my Will, in particular, has needed many iterations of the "I can sit here with you, but I cannot learn this material for you, nor will I bully you into learning" lecture, sigh, and both times that we have needed to leave the house today, I have managed to work myself up into manic, frustrated tears--it should not take 40 minutes, constant reminders, raised voices, and manic, frustrated tears to get us out the door to go somewhere that a child enjoys going to! ARGH!!!

Anyway, tears dried, traffic battled, here we are at one child's aerial silks class, the other child working contentedly on her reading assignment while I get a little work done, myself.

MONDAY: I've mixed up our regular schedule a bit this week--I've ditched a couple of assignments each day and replaced them with a daily Christmas project and, for Will, daily exploration of a math/science online computer program that I've got a free two-week trial for. I've discovered through experience that the kids love these sorts of programs, but also that they tire of them quickly, so two weeks of activity is probably just about right. For the Christmas projects, I expect that some of them will be crafty in nature, but I've also discovered through experience that I can use the kids' general Christmas enthusiasm to get some real help with holiday chores. Today, for example, they're writing Christmas cards to our nearest and dearest, so I can check that job off my list!

Will's still happy with the recorder, but Syd, over Thanksgiving, was inspired to give piano a try. She has so many relatives on the West coast who play piano, and eagerly took a piano lesson from her grandma before we left. I'm willing to pay for piano lessons for her, but I know how challenging she can find formal lessons when she doesn't automatically take to the subject, and I know how her frustrated feelings manifest in acting uncooperative, so I'm going to make her take several weeks' worth of keyboard lessons from me, first, to see if she's ready for this.

TUESDAY: Peace Hill Press had a Cyber Monday sale, so I bought the digital files of First Language Lessons, volume 3, and I'm eager to start our first lesson! There are more word ladders for logic, and an extra lesson on acids and bases before the girls move on in their chemistry set. Will also has a math enrichment class that she'll be going to on Tuesdays now, which may give me and Syd just enough time to make that model volcano.

WEDNESDAY: In addition to math and memory work, which never cease, Will has a meeting of her online Magic Tree House Club, which also entails listening to the audiobook of Revolutionary War on Wednesday. She LOVES Magic Tree House Club, and is going to be stoked.

THURSDAY: I finally took my  own advice and moved one of our subjects away from our overbooked Thursdays, so what's left looks quite manageable. This Yorkshire pudding business is going to be a new one for Syd AND me (What, no raisin bread?!? We finally ran out of raisins, and I didn't want to make a special trip to the store), but she loves Harry Potter so much that I wanted her to learn how to make something British, and I hope that Will can figure out the Spacewar ROM that I downloaded for her, because I sure can't! It's the very first videogame, though, so we've got to give it a shot.

FRIDAY: I'd forgotten that Will's ice skating class is dismissed until January, or I would have put another school assignment there--lucky kids! Instead, we've got some geography to finish up that we didn't get to on that last hectic Friday before Thanksgiving vacation, and since we just saw real, live papyrus growing in a pot, I'm pulling out a papyrus papermaking kit that I bought this past summer. I really want us to make canopic jars, but I do NOT have the energy to source old baby food jars and clean the labels off right now. That sounds like a mid-January sort of project, don't you think?

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: On Saturday, I'm having the girls try out a once-a-month nature class that I'm hoping they like (nature skills = yay, of course, but so does one day a month just for me and my Matt!), and there are a couple of other activities that we can do that day--a puppet-making workshop at the library, a symphony concert at the hands-on-science museum--but other than that, we're free as birds! Just between you and me, though, I'm hoping that there's a really great football game on TV on Sunday. Matt watches football on the cable TVs on our university's campus, and he always takes the girls with him. A whole evening, just me?

That suits me JUST fine.