Weekly Review: A Fly on the Wall

This year has been a very different one to previous years. Up until last year I had five children who were all home at different times throughout the week, studying or working part time and for the few years before that there were seven filling up the house. It's been a very a different dynamic this year with only the two youngest at home during the day.
I've always had a flexible approach to home schooling and whilst I can't see myself getting rigid, I think I do need to be more structured. When I had lots of kids to teach, I naturally fell into a routine. I had to or I never would have got anything done. Now that I don't have the same pressure of circumstances, it's easier to let the time leak.

Sometimes I find it helpful to write down what we're doing as we go, to get a better idea of where the leaks are occurring and to see where I need to be more intentional.

This is a fly on the wall's view of a couple of days of this past week.

Wednesday

Got up at 7am.

Zana (22) first year of teaching (Year 6); Nougat (18) apprentice plumber, have already left for work

Benj, Moozle & I do our individual Bible reading 

8am - Dad leaves for work 

Benj (15)- Maths & Science; Jensen's Format Writing

Hoggy (20) goes for a run, and then heads off to TAFE - he's in his 3rd year of a 4 year cadetship & studying electrical engineering technology.

Moozle (10) - Cello practice. I do some patchwork and keep an eye on her practice to make sure she's doing what she should. She has an exam in about three weeks.

Copy work; listens to times tables & does her drawing practice using Mark Kistler's Draw Squad:

Singapore maths with me

Age of Fable - I've been reading this aloud to her; oral narration

Drawing pactice while listening to Dvorak's Largo:

Benj - piano practice

Moozle - Dictation, Grammar using the dictation passage (colour the proper nouns blue, underline nouns in purple, circle the verbs green.

'Europe was at peace, and Napoleons in exile on the Isle of Elba. Matthew hardly knew of this, for he had been in bed sixteen weeks, steadily becoming weaker.'

Maths speed drill

Poetry review while continuing with drawing 

Lunch - free reading 

Together time

Devotions: Bible, memory work, prayer time

Poetry - William Wordsworth. I've used The Harp & Laurel Wreath by Laura Berquist to delve a little deeper with poetry with the older children. She has some commentary on various poems & a good selection.
Read aloud: A Fortunate Life by A.B. Facey - an Australia classic set in the outback of Western Australia. It's good.

Hoggy comes home - takes Benj to work at 3.30pm

Moozle and I go to Orchestra rehearsal

Home around 5.30pm

I pick up Benj from work. He's doing some training for the part-time job he's starting which has thrown a spanner in the works a few days this week.

Dinner

Zana and I have a quick trip to the Library

Come home and spend some time with that man of mine.

Thursday

6am - Dad has a conference call at home for work

7am - I head off to the markets on my own to do a quick shop

8am - I get home; cook breakfast & dh and I have some time together before he goes to work

Benj - Maths, Reading, oral narration, piano practice

Moozle - Maths, Cello practice, Latin 

I read aloud Old Man River and Monarch of the Western Skies to Moozle while she 

does her drawing practice (she likes drawing, in case you didn't realise)

French & copy work

We take Benj to work at 12pm

Lunch

Listen to Folksong:

Washing & other domestics

We leave home around 3pm to pick Benj up from work and go to swimming lessons.

5.30pm - I head home with Moozle & make dinner.
Thursday evenings are generally erratic at our place with swimming, soccer, and everyone arriving home at all different times.
Usually I go back to the pool to get Benj but not tonight. Dad is running late so he goes straight to the pool so I can start:

7pm - Book Club at my place. We're working through Start Here by Brandy at Afterthoughts.
I've really enjoyed reading through For the Children's Sake by Susan Schaeffer Macaulay yet again. Brandy's study links the chapters in Schaeffer's book to Charlotte Mason's Philosophy of Education:

The rest of the family go to bed before we finish our study...

11.30pm - winding down & off  to bed at midnight.

Some things are worth losing a bit of sleep over...now & again.



Linking up with Weekly Wrap-up

A Peek into our Place - and a Girl Graduates

 A Learning Journey

Education is an Atmosphere

Education is a Discipline and a Life...
  
And yesterday - her reward for four years of hard work...Zana finished her degree in November last year and this was her 'official' graduation ceremony.

 

 It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Theodore Roosevelt, 1910 

An Impromtu Jam Session

 I really miss this. It used to happen most days but now with the older two married and three studying or working full-time, it only happens big time on the weekends. I didn't always feel like listening to the racket they made but it was worth the inconvenience and noise. My 'reading room' turned  into a music studio, but it is one of my greatest pleasures to have everyone playing music together.

 Benj has been reading through Isaac Asimov's, Understanding Physics in conjunction with Apologia Physical Science. This is an experiment he did on Newton's Third Law:

 

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This website reviews Asimov's books (he wrote many). This one is highly regarded and has some good reviews on Amazon. It also comes as three separate volumes:

Benj went to the Royal Easter Show with his older brother & a group of friends. He came home with hundreds of photos. He thought I'd appreciate this one:

And from Moozle after our reading of  Plutarch's Life of Timoleon...

 A Syracrusian's Soliloquy on a Tyrants Statue

A man stood looking at a statue in his house. He said, "O thou wicked thing! I am glad that I sell thee tomorrow! Indeed, I should have sold thee before, when the tyrant fled. But I waited too late, ah, never mind. I am indeed grateful that I sell thee on the morrow! Thee and the one who thou art made in likeness of have wronged me sorely. Tch, tch, he was a very bad man. I wonder who will buy thee, hm........Maybe... Aha! Malisianio Cornierio He was very attached to the tyrant! If he buys it.........I wonder........well, well! Glad am I to sell thee! T'will rid me of the memory of him! The tyrant was very ugly, and so are thee! The tyrant had a round face, with a nose like a hawk's beak,and large pale eyes, he hardly had any eyebrows! Thou art the very likeness of him! Tut, tut! If no one buys thee, I will reduce thee to a heap of rubble! I will denounce Cornierio if he buys thee!" So saying, he left the house leaving the idol sitting where it was. The next day people saw in the newspaper that Malisianio Cornierio had been denounced by Litianio Katierio, for aiding and abetting the tyrant in his work of being a cruel ruler. The newspapers said that Katierio had denounced Cornierio when Cornierio had come to buy his idol, saying, "Thou art a foul traitor, and I denounce thee in the name of the populace, for aiding and abetting the tyrant in his work of destroying the city!" Cornierio had replied, "Why dost thou accuse me of being a traitor, I helped the tyrant only to gain favour, and see if I could help the city, and thou dost accuse me now when I buy this idol only to gain pleasure when I reduce it to a heap of rubble!"

He was arrested and his statement searched, and was found that he was lying.

                                                                          THE END

(She hasn't quite got the idea about paragraphs.)

Linking to:

Finishing Strong and Weekly Wrap-Up

Looking Down the Mountain - Reflections from a Homeschooled Graduate

I originally posted this two and a half years ago when Zana was in her second year of university. She graduated at the end of last year and this week she started teaching a Year 6 class. Well done, my lovely girl. You've worked hard and will make a wonderful teacher!

Looking down the mountain after a hard climb - Mt Kosciusko, New South Wales

  An unedited post from my 19 year old daughter, Zana, our third child:

So I have just finished uni for the semester and my mother has finally managed to corner me into writing something for her blog. Looking back on my home-schooling experience is interesting now that I’m in my second year of uni. I guess now I’ve had a fair amount of experience with something other than being home-schooled to give myself another perspective. I’m studying primary school teaching which is somewhat ironic considering my own education, but it’s what I enjoy and feel called to do. 

The thing I loved most about being home-schooled was the freedom to focus on the aspects of learning that I loved. An example of this was my music. In year 12, I was spending around 15hr a week on average either playing or studying music. If I had an HSC work load, this would have been very difficult. I also really appreciate the fact that I was encouraged to read and to love books. I didn’t do much formal history throughout school. Instead, I just read books…probably hundreds of them all up…simply because that was the way I liked to learn. I’m doing an English major as part of my uni degree and I love it. I find that even if I absolutely hate a text, I can still enjoy studying it. I also appreciate the fact that I never thought of friendships as being ‘restricted’ to my own age group like many people I know did while school-aged. My best friend is a year & a half older than me and my friends are a wide variety of ages. On the more trivial side, I am not a morning person at all…so not having to get up early to go anywhere was definitely a positive!

My mum is not the most organised person on planet earth. Throughout high school, I scheduled my own work and managed almost everything for myself. I was also encouraged to think for myself and not accept things at face value. I liked this sense of independence, and it’s served me very well at university. A lot of my friends who went to school complained about it being hard to adjust to uni. I haven’t had any issues with the workload or style of learning and it really hasn’t required a lot of adjustment. I may have been the ‘most hated/envied’ person amongst my friends for not doing the HSC, finishing school 6 months earlier than everyone else, and studying online uni units for the rest of the year. I think the HSC places far too much stress on students and I have no regrets about not doing it!!

I do think that home-schooling parents have a tendency to shelter their children from the real world to a certain extent. However, if they make that extra bit of effort with social activities, I think home-schooling can be very positive. There are a lot of things about school that I’m not sorry at all to have missed out on. I think I would have enjoyed the social side and things like group sports; however, I got involved with similar things outside of my home as well. Personally, I think I might have disliked home-schooling if it weren’t for the fact that we have a big family. However, that may have something to do with the fact that I would probably go mad having all the attention on just me all the time. I like my independent learning!

There was a stage in my early teens when, if given the choice, I would have picked going to school over being home-schooled and if you’d asked me whether I’d home-school my own kids the answer would have been no. To be perfectly honest, however, that was more to do with the social side of things, and once I joined an orchestra, started playing futsal and started going to a youth group, that desire disappeared. 

I am thoroughly enjoying my teaching degree and I am looking forward to teaching in the school system. I have no intention of being a conservative teacher and I may turn a few heads with my ‘interesting’ ideas, but if anything, I think that my lack of ‘school experience’ will serve me very well. I don’t feel the need to teach in certain ways just because that’s how everyone else does it. What I want is for kids to come away from my classes with a love for learning and for books and the recognition that school doesn’t have to be a boring place to be.

So, would I home-school my own kids in the future?? I would definitely consider it. I think there are inherent issues in the way schools are run and how students learn & are taught in them. However, I am not anti-school. Personally, I think it’s more an issue of the teacher.