We all have a schedule.....a routine......that must be followed when school is in session. We get up at the same time every morning, eat breakfast, pack lunches, and get off to school. Then there's the afternoon routine of homework, dinner, and carpools to football, soccer and dance. Every day is planned by default with the obligations of our educational and extra-curricular activities.
But when summer arrives, so do lazy mornings, late nights and days that tick by slowly.....reluctantly filled with swimming, video games, reruns of Bewitched and the Flintstones.
On these low-slow days, I try to enforce summer reading and little math exercises. The result of my efforts confirms one thing:
If I tried to homeschool, my peeps would be illiterate.
I don't have what it takes to teach my peeps in a loving, excited-about-learning way. I am the Catholic-school-nun-with-a-ruler type. As a peep myself, I loved school. In the summers, I played school, pretending to be the teacher. I had a blackboard and some chalk and I would drill Delaweird on math facts. I considered becoming a teacher when I was in college, but the lure of big business pulled me to my B.S. in Business Management.
The best I've been able to do toward schooling this summer is to enforce a 30 minute reading time, usually late in the afternoon when it's too hot to be outside. Yesterday, we managed to play Scrabble, but Action was frustrated because he doesn't "know that many words". His second grade vocabulary didn't fail him.....he did just fine whipping out words like "ride" and "roar" (he had lots of r's). We finished the game, but he asked that we not play scrabble again for a while. He wants to play Jenga and fight Count Dooku on Star Wars Wii.
If real life included Star Wars references, Action would be the King of the World.
But it doesn't (not yet anyway).
I have one project for them that will be a learning experience.....planning our Big Road Trip (which Action has already dubbed the Road Trip of Disaster [subtitled Can't we just fly?]) I bought an atlas. I want them to calculate the route, the estimated miles and driving time. I also want them to figure out how long we should drive each day and where we should stop each night. I might end up at Motel 6 in the northwest corner of Georgia, but I am not going to interfere. I want them to have ownership in this trip.
Skibbie has already questioned why they must do this calculation manually (We have a GPS. Isn't that what it's for?)
Darned technology. She'll probably track us live on Google Maps on her cell phone.
I can only count on poor cell tower coverage to demonstrate the value of knowing how to read the map.
If you homeschool (or if you don't), do you have any tips for me? My goal is to keep them reading and make sure they remember the math facts, and ideally, have some fun along the way.
4 comments:
Okay, having been on the receiving end of your "schoolin" - you are right, you are the strict nun screaming, "Why don't you get this?!" Here is the long awaited answer Big Sis - "MATH SUCKS!" Had you had history, romance, or tried to teach me something intersting, then that would be a different story. Suggestion, instead of reading at home why not take them to the library and have them walks the isles and find something they'd LIKE to read. Also, you are going to have to make math relatible to them....look on some website to help you with that.
--Good to have you back from vacation! ---Delaweird
P.S. Yes, I now see all the spelling and punctuation errors in my last post. I failed to use spell check. I know that bothers you, so, sorry. --- Delaweird (again)
I have no words of wisdom for you.
Our library did have summer reading programs that they liked to participate in for treats.
We did read some books (Harry Potter books) out loud, due to differing reading levels.
I will say that our girls are BIG readers and The Boy will read something if he is really interested.
We all HATE math.
Hey...I'm with Skibbie.....what's the point?
It's not likely that GPS systems will go extinct in the next few years and we'll all have to return to reading maps manually.
I remember my PE teacher forcing us to keep score manually while bowling. She said it would be valuable one day.....I can't see where she was right, but I still know how to keep score manually....maybe when we set up the plastic pins in the "school room" (where no school is ever done).
(seriously....You Rock Hat Chick!....we do summer school for 2 hours every morning...reading in Portuguese and English, reading maps (I'm not kidding), American history, math and what ever interactive educational games they are allowed to play online....but it must last for two hours. We all sit at the table...they learn and I blog. Works for us, anyway.
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