Curriculum Shopping & Sanity Day

Some days, I’m on my game from the minute my feet hit the floor.

Other days, the kids throw dirt in eachother’s sweaty hair, effectively making a mud helmet, need baths before lunch, and then Mama kinda gives up around 4:30pm and decides to order pizza for dinner and watch Winnie the Pooh while she cleans up the quarter dozen eggs that were smashed on the dining room floor…

*Sigh* guess which kind of day today was?

In any case, I did make some progress in curriculum shopping and price comparison.

Sometimes I shop used, other times I just make the investment because I’ve got 3+ more children who will use the same curriculum so I bite the bullet and pay full price.

I’m stuck at the moment between some Sonlight curriculum options and some math material from the Classical Conversations shop. I’ll spend the next few weeks deciding which subjects we want to focus on.

With the youngest, we’ll do more of the same constructive play, development of gross and fine motor skills, and letter, number, shape, and color recognition.

My oldest has made it through the pre-reading curriculum with relative success. We are going to spend some time in review of lowercase letters and letter sounds before moving on to level 1 of the All About Reading series.

I think once we master more reading, we will expand upon our subject matter and move into history, science, etc. We touch on them mildly, but we can go into more detail once little one is able to read more on his own.

My biggest challenge for this fall will be incorporating all the kids in group activities and maintaining individualized, age and skill-level appropriate activities as well…

That’s the really fancy way of saying, I’ve gotta keep the small ones busy while big brother and sister learn.

Then, just in time for spring semester, we’ll have a newborn to throw all our routines straight out the window!

God willing, a lot of what we have been working on the last week with the visual schedule should hopefully be on autopilot at that point. On that subject, everyone’s behavior has really vastly improved.

My son and husband had a reckoning. By that I mean, my boy pushed my husband just to see how far he’d bend. Ha! My son hasn’t figured out “once a Marine, always a Marine.”

In true toddler fashion, he threw every toy until each one was confiscated. So when my husband said, “I’m taking away everything you throw,” and my son pushed his mattress off his box spring onto the floor, my husband confiscated his bed.

Little man rocked the sleeping bag for nap time and had earned his bed back by bedtime that night. But I think he’s learned not to poke the bear…at least for now.

After that, we had a series of pretty solid days. We played “King Jack and the Dragon”

And I had to be the dragon, of course. But it was tons of fun.

And we put away some green beans

And we did really well on our school work and schedule.

I’m trying to enjoy the last bits of summer before we really get back to the daily grind of autumn and daily homeschooling.

Here’s to making the most of these lazy, late summer days.