A Little Rebellion Every Now & Then

There’s nothing like a conference followed by hosting an organization’s garage sale to totally throw your life off track. School is, of course, just one more casualty of it.

I can’t even begin to comprehend how far ‘behind’ we are from what I expected. Basically, we got nothing whatsoever done in any ‘content’ areas last week. I managed to somewhat keep her up to speed in Latin, but we’re still going to spend this week on the same vocabulary as we did last week.

Deep breaths, deep breaths.

I’m trying to use today as an evaluating day, and then I’ll move forward and write out my plans for the rest of the week. I feel all panicky, even though there’s no reason to…

Between this week and last, there are nine potential school days. Two of these have been a Thursday, which means outside classes and little work done at home. For another five of those days (one of which did overlap with a Thursday), we had an out of town guest; a lot of fun, but still disruptive to the idea of routine. Finally, tomorrow, our house is the location of a garage sale for my Mothers & More chapter. Essentially, then, that leaves two days with which something could be done.

Needless to say, we’re running a bit behind where I thought we might be at this point.

However, we’re plodding forward with the bare minimum and everything else is just gravy until next week!

Despite a snafu with the alarm clock (namely, not hearing it), we still managed to get up just in time for breakfast. I suppose I should say the time that I have for breakfast on the ideal schedule in my head, rather, but I do think regular eating times are important. We all ate breakfast, we all got dressed, and we headed upstairs right at 8 am.

The whole idea is to do school for approximately two hours before taking a mid-morning break. Some days it will work out to only an hour and a half, followed by more work before lunchtime, but it’s a decent structure from which to work. Gillian started with math – two pages in Miquon Blue and then one sheet of Caluladder. It’s very obvious that we took a significant amount of time away from the drillwork. I’m going to have to remember that for the future, that even three weeks can have an effect.

After math was done, it was recitation time. Next week we’ll start adding new things to memorize, but this week is review of the poems and such that have already been memorized. Latin followed, with some review of flashcards and general oral review.

Those are our three core subjects – math, recitation, and Latin. I had about an hour alloted, in my head, to cover all three, and we took approximately fifty-five minutes. Caluladder will take less time as the weeks pass, and Latin will most likely require more time, but overall, the idea of an hour should hold for the forseeable future.

After the hour was up, Gillian chose between spelling or handwriting first. She chose spelling, completed the workbook pages, and we had a ’spelling test.’ The primary reason is that I’m trying to determine her retention level. She got half of the words right, so either later today or tomorrow, we’ll go over the words again. Handwriting was quick – capital letter review and review of the number one. We did today’s exercise out of Oral Language Lessons, she did copywork from a past lesson in First Language Lessons, and today’s lesson in FLL was merely a narration exercise. I’m thinking of skipping the narration exercises after today. At the very least, I’m going to combine them with the exercises immediately preceding or following, because we get plenty of practice with narration when we do science, history, classical studies, literature… you get the idea.

We read the first few pages in Prehistoric World, which is what we’re doing for biology work for now. We talked about time, fossils, and evolution. Strictly speaking, only evolution is biology, but I think context is important. We’ll work through the book, just reading the pages for the most part, until the end of the month, most likely, and then transition to R.E.A.L. Science: Life, which I still need to order.

Finally, Gillian read the second half of The Gods and Goddesses of Olympus, which details information about the major gods and goddesses, some of their major myths, and so forth. I’ll read it to her as well during Jacob’s naptime, and we’ll draw an Olympus Family Tree!

Currently she’s reading It’s Disgusting and We Ate It!. She’ll read plenty throughout the day, but she’ll definitely read in A Spy on the Home Front.

Tuesday, September 5 is our official “First Day of First Grade.”

We don’t have any specific celebratory plans, though perhaps we’ll go and visit Bruster’s for ice cream in the late morning or early afternoon.

The list of subjects and how we’re going to approach them, as well as how often we will tackle them, is about ninety-nine percent firm. Nothing’s ever one hundred percent, is it?

The day will start with recitation, Latin, and arithmetic. The order will no doubt vary, but those three items will be done in the first hour and will be done before contemplating any other subject. Grammar, spelling, handwriting, and copywork will be covered four out of five days of each week. Science – biology – will be covered either one or two days per week; historical studies – the ancients – will be covered either one or two days per week; and classical studies – foundational Greek & Roman myths – will be covered one day per week. Finally, we will listen to various albums of classical music throughout the week (optimally, an album each week, listening to the album in its entirety once per day), Gillian will attend an art skills class one day per week, and we will look at one or two pages in The Children’s Book of Art one afternoon each week.

Further, Gillian will be expected to read each day, for at least thirty minutes’ duration, with the time increasing as her reading profiency and fluency develops.

I have high hopes for this school year. Gillian is excited and eager to begin, and the school area has been neatened up considerably from its story state just over a week ago.

It’s time to move on, time to get going… what lies ahead I have no way of knowin’.