What Do I Want For My Kids? What Do I Want For Our Days?

My question at the end of my last post was:  How do I transition in all of this? How do I grow with my kids and this new season of life? How do I move forward this school year? What do I want our week to look like?

My goal was for a slow and peaceful childhood. But something I didn't talk about was that I also want them to have to work some struggle muscles. Some of the reason I chose a more traditional, curriculum based homeschool model (over radical unschooling or whatever) is that I want my kids to realize not everything worth having in life is going to feel easy or fun. I want to work those struggle muscles and for them to see that they can do hard things. I want them to have self-discipline that not everything is all about them or easy breezy, feel good fun.  I want them to have the experience of  navigating something arbitrary and distasteful and having new skills or understanding because of it. Not to create hardship for the sake of hardship but to develop their character and help them have some recall to draw from into adulthood.

I need to find the balance between wanting them to dig in for the joy of learning something they're passionate about. And understanding that sometimes you just need to buckle down and memorize stuff so you have it handy and can use it in other ways throughout your life. Like maybe we need to incorporate math drills and maybe they need to write that paper on Louis & Clark or book report on Sarah Plain and Tall because it works "muscles" in both their character and brain. I may not align with any single educational method but I don't feel that I've gone completely awry in some of my more arbitrary requirements of them. I just struggle to teach or require the arbitrary because I struggle to teach things like they do in school. I was never good at school! 

Old pic, that's Joy4 (now almost 6) standing on the chair

So what does that mean for our school week this coming year? What do I need to do to ground us? What do I want them to learn? What do I want us to gain in this year? How can I use school as a source of connection and balance the arbitrary with the joy? What do I want our days to look like? What actually works with the real flow of our schedule and our family's lifestyle? 

I don't know. 

Schedule-wise I know the kids do best when I'm up and ready to go by 8a.m. and that's more doable now that I'm generally getting decent sleep. I'm usually awake and drinking my coffee by 7:30. 

Things that I don't enjoy about our school days previously have been: having 2-4 kids waiting on me to help them with questions. I do not enjoy bopping from kid to kid while someone acts out in the background (because they've been waiting 15 minutes and can't move on) or the boys start fighting or making tons of noise. I leave each school day frazzled and feeling grumpy because it was 2-4 hours of chasing my tail while I try to help them answer stupid questions in the text I wasn't assigned to read. I'm a bit bitter about the last school year or two in particular if you can't tell. 

Hard to believe this baby is starting 1st grade...but he's been the main source of the chaos the last 6 years!

I have come to dread school because it's just this constant relentless chaos of questions and drama and kids at loose ends and me struggling not to snap at the same behaviors we've dealt with 229 times already that week. 

So that's not working for me. 

How can I manage this better? What do I want the days to look like? 

What's worked best is to set aside an hour for each kid in the day and that's their hour to do their focused school with me. We go into my bedroom with their school basket and they get that hour with me all to themselves. But I do not have an hour to give anymore! I won't ever use a curriculum that require a full hour or my holding their hand. What would work even better is if I focused on explaining the next day's assignments to them so that they could get started earlier the next day and know what they need help with when it comes to their turn and time with me. We can bop those issues right off and be more efficient and focused. 

So what would my ideal day be this year?

My ideal  school day would be...

7:30: Wake up by then at the latest
7:30-8:00 coffee and quiet time
8:00 get breakfast together...bake the muffins, make the pancakes..make sure the smoothies.
8:30 chores...chickens, dog, cow...garden.
9:30ish Family Style Work: Read aloud, History read aloud and project. Science on the alternate days.
10:30 One on One  #1 I work for 30 minutes with AJ. She's usually the most anxious to get her work done and usually needs the most hand holding.
11:00: One on One  #2 I work 15-20 minutes with RJ she's usually at a place where she's looked everything over and has questions.
11:15 One on One  #3 I work for 30 minutes with PJ she's usually done everything she can, read her reading, done her math...and she needs help with language arts/grammar and maybe some math questions Her work usually doesn't take very long. 

And then this is the part of the day where everything falls apart. By lunch time I'm fried. It's been too much peopleing, so much thinking and questions and talking. I want a long break or I need to run errands or there are basic household things we've got to take care of ASAP...

Ideally we'd do...

Noon-ish. Lunch break  

12:30: One on One  #4 School with IF
1:00 Rest Time Mon Take RJ to Violin. 
2:00 Kids check off last of their chores before computers can be used. Friday Take RJ to violin

3:00 Free For All and Errands 

As far as a rhythm to our week? 

Mondays: RJ has Violin and currently every other Monday we have to drive down and get milk. Though that won't be an issue when we have the cow. 
Tuesday: Bread Baking. I need to teach the kids how to do this. We could focus on a baking project on Tuesdays.

Wednesday: It could be library day, we were doing Thursday but middle of the week would work better. 
Thursday: Bread baking day
Friday: Homeschool Park Meet ups  11-2 and then RJ has violin 2:30-4:30

Reading all that it makes sense why I'm tired. I think I have a better picture of what I want to do so that's good. Next post I need to work through exactly what curriculum we're going to use and how I hope to use it....Later. 

Homeschool Joys...

I want to blog more, Sunny is 16 months old and the last 18 months since my last post have been...overwhelming. Everyone always said, "If you can have 3 kids you can have 10! It's just an extra plate." That seemed to hold true for 4 kids. I'm finding 5 kids to be a whole 'nother ball of wax and it's left me feeling a bit blindsided. Some of it is the ages and personalities of my kids...Actually that's a lot of it. We're smack dab in the Middle School transition and it's been a bit of a shock. Personalities that were mostly low key are doling out a lot of hormonal angst. Personalities that were never low key are hinting at the ride ahead and we're...trying to be intentional. Trying to keep learning the same lessons we've been trying to learn for the last decade. I'm so very tired.

He's a super sweet and happy bub though!

 I wanted to start blogging about our days...Homeschooling and how delight directed homeschooling melds and bends a bit in the middle school years. I don't want to teach my kids out of fear. I don't want to have some arbitrary list of things that they "just have to know because I say so."
I want them to really absorb what they're learning and have see the depth and practicality and life applications. This leaves me at odds in this funny in between place of not really being a traditional Homeschooler, not really being an official Unschooler, not really being fully "self-directed" or "delight driven" either. I want my kids to know the importance of pushing themselves to grasp hard things. That not everything in life feels good or is convenient. I feel like they are learning these lessons, being part of a larger family we ask them to contribute to the household in meaningful ways.

Requiring daily lessons doesn't have to mean fights and tears and lines drawn in the sand. Using a curriculum *can* be delight driven. Using different resources and requiring daily intention and progress doesn't automatically shut down all joy and "true learning".

I want to share how this works in our home. Joy in living life at home with Mishmash Homeschooling.