Season 5-Liberate Your Parenting Potential

This is the season I'm most excited about! Last night's message was fantastic. I need to recopy my notes.

More Family Chores-Play Room (Sarah's Counter)

We've been working on doing a "family chore" for a half hour after lunch and reading a few times per week. Today we tackled the playroom and Sarah's counter. Isn't it beautiful!!?  Thursday I think we'll pick up the sunroom and playroom and vacuum. Hey that rhymes!

New Homeschool Routine/Time Blocks

It works awesome for me to look at the "morning routine" then lunch then "productive free time" then dinner then evening.

HEADLINE: Daniel Forces Bankruptcy in Monopoly-Crushing Mom For the Win

How often do you get to BEAT your parents at a board game? Daniel forced me into bankruptcy and won our game of Monopoly. He was pretty excited! You know in Monopoly as you get more and more, the greed monster gets stronger...well, these photos are the culmination of a well-played game and a wonderful memory.

Weekend Science

Early yesterday morning my son used the bathroom when he woke up. I heard the toilet flush as I was snuggling, all cozy in my bed. Then I heard footsteps heading downstairs. Ummmm, did he not WASH HIS HANDS!? (he's 11)

I levitated out of bed, floated down the stairs to find his UNWASHED HANDS on the CLEAN dishes as he unloaded the dishwasher.

Gathering my loving composure (!) I asked why he didn't WASH HIS HANDS. He shrugged.

"Do you know why we wash our hands"?

"Not really", he said.

Ah. Have I failed as a parent!? Instead of hyperventilating, I told him, "well, let me show you"!

We looked on YouTube for GERM VIDEOS (this was is our favorite-can't find it!).

It was great! We had awesome discussion about bacteria and filth (fun!) and both kids were eager to tell dad about the day's discoveries.

This led to my purchasing a set of 5 experiments for us to do with dad on the weekends. We are starting with heating soap in the microwave, more on that later!

UPDATE: 08/01/2011 - We haven't done any "Weekend Science" yet! We took on visiting lighthouses in Washington and hiking for the summer instead. This might be a GREAT family activity for the dark and cold winter months.

More Family Chores-Play Room

I'm in the season of planning and perfecting our routine. Part of our new afternoon routine is a "family chore". Yesterday we tackled Daniel's counter in the play room (which is really our family room converted to a "play" space, though I like to think of it as an "educational laboratory"). Today (Thursday) I put off the family chore, we'll do Sarah's side tomorrow.

The first photo doesn't really show the HEAP of stuff that was on his counter. The top photo is after we'd sorted and cleared a lot of stuff away. The 2nd photo is today...he has a few things on the counter (not to mention the duct tape that says "Dan") and he's USED his counter several times today. He even did his math there this morning. The process continues...

New Routines On Paper

Early on I figured out I wasn't a "by-the-hour" type of scheduler for our homeschool day. I prefer blocks of time (which is what Marilyn suggests in her book Develop A Lifestyle Routine). I post a monthly calendar so we can see what "events" we have each month. And now I have my new time blocks up which really helps us move through our mornings.

Our mornings are very fluid. Sometimes we want to play cards together or read and don't always have breakfast in the same order so it is nice to have a list of what we want to accomplish. Here's what's our our morning time block looks like for now:
-put on one hour of worship music
-kids empty dishwasher
-eat breakfast
-morning chore
-do bookwork (right now that includes: math & copywork)
-mom reads: history (we're currently using H.A. Guerber's Story of Ancient World) and fun reading
-brush teeth & brush hair
-Daniel shower