The truth is it had been a long and challenging week, and RobotBoy still had a fair amount of work to make up over the weekend, and I really just couldn't face typing up that report.
The good news is that he was really good about getting up and getting on-task Saturday morning with almost no nagging. The less-than-great news is that he still has a couple of minor things waiting to be finished.
The good news is that he is completely good natured about accepting the lost points for turning in his work late, freely admitting that he should have gotten it done on time. The so-so news is that I no longer have any enthusiasm for going through the motions of a weekly report for a week that doesn't seem to want to get done.
So, I'm cheating.
I realized that I have not yet posted a sample of my lesson plans for this year. And, since it's one of those things that homeschooling parents never seem to tire of discussing, I figured someone, somewhere might find it helpful.
Therefore, I am posting below the official "plan" for last week, the week that won't die. And then I'll just make a few notes about it.
Okay, what's not shown on here is the leftover reading from last week, which was selections from Exodus. We did several chapters, but are still working on finishing that this week.
As of the time we left for his dance rehearsals on Saturday afternoon, RobotBoy had finished pretty much everything on the sheet, except for two pages of Greek Alphabet Code Cracker that are "mostly done," the FLVS Geography lesson that still needs a bit of polish but should be turned in today and the Birth of Civilization DVD that didn't arrive from Netflix in time.
So, it's not terrible, but obviously we need to work on the time management and planning skills. This morning, before he started on anything, we chatted about this issue and have come up with a new strategy to help keep him on track. We created a table in Word that has columns for his four regular desk work days and rows for each subject. The idea is that we'll look together at the the week's assignments and fill in how much of each thing he's aiming to do each day. Since the last thing I want to do is create more scrap paper, we've decided to try keeping it virtual for now. We filled in the sheet together, and I e-mailed a copy of the file to him. (That way, I still have the original in case it gets "lost" or something goes wrong.)
He is keeping his copy open on his computer so he can look at the plan as he goes. As he completes each task, he changes the color of the text. Sp far, as of when he took a break for lunch at 1:00, he had finished his designated chunks for today of math, history, art and geography.
He's enthusiastic so far about the new approach and is making an effort to "front load" the week, meaning he'll try to do more than one quarter of each subject each day, leaving himself room to catch up later in the week if he needs to do so. We'll see how it goes.
The other piece of news for last week is that RobotBoy had his first organ lesson. He had a great time, seems very enthusiastic and even practiced (including on the weekend) without requiring nagging. So that, as they say, is a good thing.
And that is probably enough for now.
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