Monday, August 24, 2009

---A Day in the Life---


This is the fourth week of the Not Back to School Blog Hop over at Life with My Three Boybarians. This week's theme is A Day In the Life.

My goal this year is to stick as close to our schedule as possible. My oldest and I thrive on a strict schedule, although I have secret dreams of a go with the flow unschooling approach. However with dividing my time between four boys, it's best that I keep myself on a very detailed schedule. More schoolwork gets finished and our days end on a happier note.

With that said, I don't have a TIMED schedule. We use workboxes and blocks of time. Here is *perfect* day in our life.

7am-8am Get everyone up and going. Make beds, dress, prepare breakfast.

After breakfast or sometime before 9am, we have circle time. Nathan joins us for memory verse work and bible lesson before heading off to start his independent work. Kaleb, Gabriel, and I have calendar time. We're working on memorizing the days of the week. Included in our calendar time are time, money (counting the days), 100 chart, and place value with straws. I need to finish the temp and weather charts so we can add them as well. We do LOTW activities during this time too.

After that I help Kaleb start on his workboxes. We try to have journaling, copywork, phonics or math game, and OPG finished before lunch. He has tons of little breaks in between all of that. While he works on copywork and a game, I work with Nathan on his math. Nathan usually has his journaling, copywork, math, spelling, independent reading, and WW finished before lunch.

Lunch is between 11am and 12pm, depending on how our day is going. After lunch I put the baby down while Nathan washes up the dishes, and the middle two watch a little Noggin or LeapFrog.

We do history and science during naptime. We rotate both each day in case Drake wakes up early from nap so we'll study both at least twice a week, although we shoot for four times a week on both.

After they finish their narrations and activities for science and history, they go back to the workboxes. I work with Nathan on English while Kaleb does some fun copywork or a game. Somewhere in there both older boys have 30 minutes of computer time for fun. Kaleb and Gabriel have a 30 minute art time where we either do a fun lotw craft, paint, or color.

We try to finish up by 2pm but usually it's closer to 3pm. As long as we're finished before the ps kids get off the bus by 3:30, everyone is happy!

Gabriel spends his day rotating from doing workbooks with Mom to playing some fun educational independent games (color matching and sorting type stuff) to playing with his toys to watching some Noggin to sitting on my lap while I read from our science and history books and library books.

Drake plays, plays, plays and plays. =) He also likes to sit on my lap and listen to stories or *help* me teach the olders. I try to spend one-on-one time with Drake during the older boys' break times.

I try to keep evenings completely school-free so they can spend that time outside with friends or at various activities. We school full-time four days a week and part-time on Fridays, only doing phonics for Kaleb, English and WW for Nathan, and math for both. Starting next month we'll have afternoon co-op classes on Fridays so that works out perfectly.

My day is BUSY! =) Juggling four children, housework, and meals keeps me going but I love it. I do get my own free time and I love when we finish up early. Most days are REALLY good days....as long as I stick to my schedule!!

Go HERE to read more Day In the Life stories!!

1 comment:

  1. Wow! Here I thought homeschool with a toddler and baby was crazy :) Thanks for blogging. You encourage me to keep moving. I just need to throw away the negative comments regarding my homeschool abilities for teaching 3 kids with a babies around. BTW- "My day is busy!" is an understatement for what we do as Moms (especially Moms of 3 or more). Enjoy them because they trully are a gift.

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