So Far, So-So

(A quick update on how the ride has been in the last week or so.)

We’re still struggling with finding some kind of strategy to help RobotBoy get a reasonable amount of schoolwork done each day. We’ve tried having me just tell him what to do next, but he argues every assignment and seems to dislike not seeing the big picture. And so we fought. I’ve tried giving him a checklist of all of his assignments for each day, but he resents my attempts to “control his life.” Still, we fought. Most recently, we tried defining what constitutes a “chunk” of work for each subject and how many chunks are required per day, then just giving him the list of the week’s assignments and letting him figure out how to schedule them. He just didn’t do anything at all . . . and we fought.

So, the latest idea is to give him fewer, but larger and more defined chunks, which I write out on index cards. Each day, he is required to complete one red card (mostly history and science reading/outling and Latin), one yellow card (mostly workbook pages), two green cards (Spanish, reading, logic, vocabulary) and one blue card (music practice). He has a few “wild cards” that he can use to modify a limited number of assignments. For example, today he used a red wild card to substitute making a model of a battle from the Hundred Years’ War for the written summary I had assigned. What I suspect will make the biggest difference, however, is that he is now required to show his cards and the associated work to his dad every evening.

It’s too early to tell yet whether this will work in the long run. He did do a full day’s work yesterday with less drama than usual, but that may just be the novelty factor. We’ll have to wait a few weeks to see how it really works.

Moonheart is much more relaxed than she was last semester. Of course, she’s also behind in her history, literature and philosophy reading, but I’m hoping she’ll pick up the pace once we truly get back into our regular groove. So far, the new geometry text is going well. She doesn’t love it, but seems to be getting it without an inordinate amount of stress.

All the extracurriculars are coming back online this week, too. And I’m sure that will help provide both structure in our weeks and incentive for both kids to get and keep on track.

The Awful Truth

Every now and then, a conversation about organization pops up on one of the homeschool message boards or lists that I frequent. And I’m always impressed by the ladies who can point readers to photos on their blogs or personal websites showing their beautifully clean and organized schoolrooms. Since the last move, we don’t have a spare room to set aside just for this purpose, but we got new desks and did a lot of reorganizing at the beginning of this academic year. So, I figured I’d put up some pictures, too.

Oh boy.

Both kids wanted in on this, wanted to make sure their desks were included. So, I had them take a few minutes to straighten up before I got out the camera. And I made a huge discovery:

What you see with your own eyes is quite different from what things look like on film.

It was simply amazing how much messier everything looked in the photos, compared to my impression. It’s really embarrassing, actually. However, in the name of honesty and trying to help folks get a meaningful sense of what homeschooling is really like, I’m going to go ahead and post the photos below.


This is where we stow most of the main texts, curricula, workbooks, etc. for the year. Moonheart has the top shelf, and RobotBoy uses the bottom one.

This is the “supply cabinet,” where we keep all the shared art supplies and extra paper and so on.


Here’s “my” shelf, where I keep additional reference books, educational kits, any books or materials that aren’t written into my lesson plans but that I think might come in handy and all the readers that the kids have either already finished or not started yet. (That’s Moonheart’s guitar music on the right.)

All three of our desks are lined up against one wall in the living room. In the first picture, that’s RobotBoy’s desk on the right (with his new interactive globe handy) and mine on the left.

The second photo shows Moonheart’s desk in the corner. My planning notebook and log are at the right, front edge of my desk, in front of the inboxes where I keep loose papers until I get around to filing them. The colored file folders you can see under my desk (next to the fuzzy slippers Moonheart gave me last Christmas) store information about the kids’ assorted activities: class and rehearsal schedules, registration information for the next session, etc.

So, there it is, a quick tour of our “schoolroom,” which I hope will at least serve the purpose of making other folks feel better about their own less than pristine environments.

The Second Drop

It feels like a good time to reclaim my roller coaster metaphor from the beginning of the school year. You know how most roller coasters are constructed: that first huge incline and drop to get you going, a series of twists and turns until you slow down a bit, then a second big climb and drop to send you hurtling through the second half? Well, here we are at the beginning of our second semester, and I can feel it right in the pit of my stomach all over again.

I put off prepping for our return to schoolwork until the last possible second. Last night, after the kids went to bed, I finally cleared all of the accumulated stuff off my desk and made room for the new desk accessories and supplies RobotBoy gave me for Christmas. Then, I sat down to review the lesson plans I so carefully wrote last summer and update them to reflect the changes we made back in November. By the time I finally went to bed a little after 1:00 am, it was with the satisfaction of knowing a whole sheaf of freshly printed and three-hole-punched pages lay gleaming in my planning notebook. I felt all prepared and organized and as ready as a person could be.

Then I slept right through my alarm—something I almost never do—and didn’t wake up until I heard Moonheart doing her morning guitar practice.

The holiday season kept us unusually busy this year, so we more or less limped into the end of the first semester. Moonheart did manage to finish her Microeconomics course, although she had to work well into what should have been vacation time to do so. The good news is that she did well enough on her final exam to hang onto her A for the class. I don’t think it has quite sunk in for her just exactly what a big difference this is going to make in her workload and her daily schedule. She spent a week working on the new Precalculus class before we decided it was just plain more work than she was prepared to do this year. I encouraged her to drop it. And the combination of Nutcracker madness and general holiday excitement kept RobotBoy from focusing on much of anything academic from mid-November onward, meaning that he ended the semester with a backlog of work in several subjects that will have to be made up over the course of the second semester.

Since the last math class Moonheart didn’t hate was Geometry, we decided to see if we could find her an advanced geometry course/text/curriculum. We settled on a text from Key Curriculum Press called Advanced Euclidean Geometry, which integrates a lot of exercises using Geometer’s Sketchpad. It looks really promising. However, by the time both the book and software actually arrived, it didn’t seem worth getting started only to break for the holidays. So, she will be starting that today. She will also be starting her reading for the Introduction to Philosophy course I have laid out for her. And our history/literature focus will shift from the middle ages to the Renaissance. Her composition work will become more demanding, as she moves into the essay-writing section of Wordsmith Craftsman.

Changes and additions for RobotBoy this semester include slowing down his pace in Latin for Children. I’ve noticed that he seems to be struggling a bit this year and that doing his Latin has become extremely unpleasant. So, I’ve decided to stretch Primer B over two years and to aim for having him finish only the first half of the book this year. He’s also doing the translations from the accompanying Libellus de Historia, so it should be enough to keep him busy. He will be starting the Carson Dellosa World Geography workbook, moving on to Orbiting with Logic and adding a page or two of sentence diagramming to his weekly workload.

Other than that, life continues more or less as usual. We did add a new kitten to our family just before Christmas. May I just say how much “fun” it was to have a Christmas tree and gifts with all those lovely and tempting ribbons on them in the house with two young cats? I do think their favorite thing was the electric Lego train, though.

But now the lights and decorations are down. We have one more week before most of the extracurriculars get underway again. And I admit to being more than a bit relieved to have our limited living space tree- and train-free and to be sitting at a relatively clean and well-organized desk with a fresh set of lesson plans in front of me and a whole new semester in which to learn and grow along with my kids.

Wishing you all a smooth post-holiday transition and a great ride!

Note: This message was edited and approved by Bessie the guinea pig, despite the fact that she believes there are too many cats in it.