1. Flex. When you have company (as we did early in the week) move "school" around so that the company can maintain some sense of having their own space. Oh, and if you let the company play with the toddler then everyone wins.
2. Hand it over. Let others speak into your kids' learning. We had a co-op on Tuesday where Liese got my kids thinking about homophones, alliteration and other linguistic ideas. Then I followed up for the next two days with corresponding activities. Cool.
3. Plug in. If you can involve a computer then do it. J is doing two full subjects using a computer curriculum this year, we are learning some HTML, we looked up Colorado scenery for our notebooks and we did some online searching for information. Everyone likes school better when we crowd around the monitor.
4. Change. We finally heard back from a one-day-a-week public program for homeschoolers and we quickly got all the info in order to take them to their first day today. J is taking Pre-Algebra, P.E. Art, Yearbook/Journalism and possibly Theater Arts. B is taking Computers, Science, Art, Language Arts, P.E. and Karate. (Let me say that with B's emphasis... KARATE!!!!) And they also get to eat PIZZA for lunch (with equal emphasis). I hope they're having a good time because I'm feeling a little lost today with just S at home.
And now we're off to the mountains for the weekend! It's been an up-and-down kind of a week for our fam. It will be good to chill.
I love it when they go home and keep going! Last year at my poetry co-op I had ALL boys who said they could NEVER write poetry. Yet Stefanie's boys came up with poetry about math and space terms I don't even know, and it was good.
ReplyDeleteI try to have a few 'learning' co-ops each time and some 'just for fun' ones too, but it's nice when fun and learning merge.
And yeah, company means you need to be flexible. The best thing is to try to do school stuff with the company (but make sure it's cool school stuff!)