Monday, January 5, 2015

Back to School after Christmas

Today we started back up with school at our dining room table. I have to say that I will be extremely tempted in future years to only have us take one week off for Christmas break.  The house just seems to run so much more smoothly when we have our regular routine and when we deviate from that routine for more than a week grumpiness abounds.

And it wasn't just the Grumpasaurus feeling grumpy.
Sadie asked almost every day last week whether we were starting school that day, knowing full well that we weren't, but apparently hoping that I was going to change my mind (and if I'd been a little more organized I happily would have, but with the flu making the rounds I just didn't have everything in order yet to implement the changes I was planning on making for our first month back at school).

Now it seems that the flu has passed and everyone is healthy and we're finally getting back into the swing of things.  I announced my grand plan to Sadie, which is that for the month of January we're going to focus mostly on history.

We both love history and have focused so much on reading and spelling and math that we haven't been able to put as much energy into it as we'd have liked to so far this year.  We're still going to be doing reading and math (and a few other subjects), just not as intensely since most of our energy is going to be going towards learning more about each time period as we go through her history book.

So it's a time of projects and crafts and stories since the history program we're doing has enough "extras" for each chapter to fill up a week (we're aiming for a chapter a day, which means each night I'll be choosing stories and arts and crafts for the following day... this history program involves more preparation than all of our other subjects together).

Although I guess I should limit our expectations for Tuesdays and how much we're going to get done.  I went a little overboard on the Tuesday schedule.

Okay, if I'm honest I have to admit that maybe I went a little overboard on Sadie's entire activity schedule this year (to make up for last year, perhaps?). There were just so many options and so many of them were so close to home that I just couldn't help myself (and the fact that they were in the ten dollar range for 2-3 months of class helped too!).

Right now she has ballet on Monday's and her AHG troop every other Friday.  That part is easy enough to fit in.  On Tuesday's though she has OT in the mornings and then a homeschool art class in the afternoon, followed by a homeschool acting class and then Karate, which she takes with Paul on Tuesday nights.

I'll admit when I saw that there was a homeschool art class available my first thought was excitement at the idea of Sadie getting to do an art project with zero cleanup and zero opportunity for her little brother and sister to get at the art supplies and spread them around my living room.  Those two are like heat seeking missiles when it comes to art supplies and they prefer the walls to any other canvases.  It's all I can do to keep art supplies out of their hands.

Now to step away from the blog for the night and get to work on tomorrow's lesson plan.

I'll leave you with this little moment of ballerina-Maggie-magic (if you're on instagram or facebook you've probably already seen it, but it's one of my all time favorite videos of one of my kids and so I had to share it here too!):


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