Little School on the Farm

\

Field Trip To Fire Museum

Homeschooling has been such a breeze and every moment has been wonderful! The richness of each lesson I lovingly spend time organizing and executing, along with the enriching field trips that we do weekly have brought my children so much joy and love of learning. Both children on on the verge of genius now and I can credit it all to my devoted, scholarly and nurturing lessons that fill most of every day......

Just kidding! I just wanted to get all the unrealistic ideas of what I might say out of the way.

So we have been plugging away in a not too organized fashion with our schooling. I had to laugh at myself a little cause the other day a good friend of mine who is also homeschooling told me how they are doing a unit on the human body, It sounds like she is doing some really cool projects and lessons around the theme. It sounds so fantastic---but so unlikely to happen at our house. I know how neat something like that would be but I swear I am a little ADD. I teach my kids the way I tend to think....very scattered and on whatever seems to pique my or their interest at the moment. (ie: Mom, how deep is the Nile? I don't know lets look it up! It's 33 feet...now lets look up the biggest spider in the world!). We have had the 'wow--lets write it on the calendar!' days where we hit every subject we can....language arts, social studies, science, art, math and a cooking class for good measure--but they are few and far between. Then there are other days where a trip to the grocery store, cleaning the house and dropping by the library makes up our school day. There are also the totally lazy days (please tell me everyone has these!) where I halfheartedly listen to the kids read to me while I feed Dallin---we stumble through some verbal math (hey kids who can tell me what 14 take away 3 is?)and then I put on a movie and the baby for a nap so I can get something done....and sometimes that something is a nap. I'm being brutally honest here! In between all those extremes we have some average days with computer, pencil/paper assignments and lots of reading. We are for sure not going to win Homeschool Family on the year.

Good news though! The boys had to do some testing last week and in the reading/letter stuff (yes, that is the technical term) both boys scored above average. Math they both did very well also, so away we go with our ADD schooling. It must not be terrible, right?

Oh back to those sugar cookies (see? ADD!): I had a little dough left on Monday and so the boys each picked out a cookie cutter and I let them frost their baked creation with the little remnants of frosting leftover from the big frosting craze earlier. Their creations ended up a purply gray mottled tone as the boys were mostly interested in trying to pack on as much frosting as possible. Then I had the boys write a 'story' to go with their cookie before they could eat them and here is what we ended up with. Here is what Preston's says...with corrected spelling: "This is Grandpa Rat (he thought it was very funny to name his fish 'Rat'---gotta love first grade humor!). Grandpa Rat and Grandma Gingy want to get married. At the wedding they fight. Then they stop. Then they laugh. The end."

And don't forget Eli's He is much more to the point...I think he may have swallowed about 60 times during the writing of this little story as he anticipated the sugary treat to crunch into at the end of the assignment: "This is Grandma Gingy. She wants to be eaten. The end."

I feel like maybe the marriage must not have worked out so well after all....





 Anyway, so more to the point we have our good days, our bad days ("Mom I  HATE writing (or math, or reading etc.etc.) this is the WORST day EVER!!!!" and the classic "Why do I have to do this, you are so mean!"). I won't even say that every day is interesting. It's not...some days end and I have no real clear idea what we did or if there was anything significant the kids would be able to take from the day, but you know what? Life is good. We are healthy, the boys are creative (lets play Puss and Boots and use our new pocket knives to carve a P into the couch! And yes, that really happened...my poor ugly couch!)), learning and growing and in the end, I have noticed the boys have become even closer friends these last few months. We still have the knock-down-drag-outs, but I also get to witness the moments of "Eli, do you want me to read you this book?" Or "Here Preston, I'll help you finish your math so we can start recess!" There are the moments where I think, "Man, I am so good!" and other moments when I think, "I hope DHS doesn't catch wind of this!"

And...even on the days when I don't really remember any huge 'ah-hah!' groundbreaking moments, I do feel pretty confident in thinking that at some point, amid the whining, bribing and threatening of our school day, that we likely had a few laughs and sweet moments. I just hope those moments of joy are the ones that paint the boys memory of this year of homeschooling.