Homeschooling lessons for me

I can tell I'm a little bit more relaxed about homeschooling these days. I am not exactly going "by the book" anymore.

I have four day lesson plans for Bible, history, read-alouds (chapter books I read to Megan), and language arts.

I have five day lesson plans for math, readers (chapter books that Megan reads to me), and handwriting.

When I started homeschooling with Megan, I would do everything on Monday that I was supposed to do on Monday. I would do Bible, history, read-alouds, language arts, math, readers, and handwriting. I didn't go ahead, I didn't make up from the day before. Right on schedule. The rest of the week would work the same way.

Sometimes this didn't work and we would get a little behind for the week. Maybe I would get my four days done, but still have math, handwriting, and readers I had to squeeze in over the weekend or something. (Seriously, I thought I would have plenty of time to teach Megan! HA!)

My theory was that as long as I had all the work from the previous week done by Sunday night, then I would be good! I have week-long lesson plans and they need to be done a week at a time.

Well, last week, I didn't teach Megan on two days because of some other things that came up, so I assumed we would get it done over the weekend. Well, that didn't happen. It doesn't help that she had a ton of homework to catch up on. Like 2 assignments of math, 5 assignments of handwriting, language arts, science, and I really try to get piano lessons in once a week.

So when I got up this morning, I knew we had some catching up to do, since we didn't get it finished over the weekend. My new goal was to have her homework done by 1:30 (when we usually start school), then we would do the last few lessons from last week (our spelling test, one more lesson in math, and Bible), do our AWANA verses, learn a little about Halloween, and then start on anything for this week.

So we did! It is amazing, Megan managed to get her math done this morning along with her handwriting. Really, I told her she couldn't come eat lunch until she had it done- and she did it! She still has language arts and science to do, but I didn't exactly need those done by today, so I let them slide...until tomorrow.

So now we are back on track with everything, mostly anyway. We got through our AWANA verses today and learned about Halloween. I even started some work for the upcoming week.

The funny thing about this is that even though we were behind in some things, we are 5 days ahead in our reader. We've been reading this detective book and today we were supposed to read chapter 6, then tomorrow, chapter 7, and by Friday, we were supposed to read chapter 10 and finish the book. Well, we just finished it all today. We sat down to read and since the chapters are only about 5-6 pages, Megan kept saying, "Just one more chapter?" If things were going good with Christian and Courtney, we would keep on reading! So we read all 5 chapters and finished the book. Amazing.

I'm learning about flexibility. Now tomorrow we won't have to do readers, so I might have some time to do two lesson in history. It's kind of nice to be able to work ahead or save some lessons for later. This doesn't work it all the subjects, but some it works really nicely.

I really like it that if she has an interest in something she is studying about, we can stop and research it a little bit more on the Internet. We are reading a chapter book about a missionary in China and how she encountered women who had bound their feet. So what did we do? We stopped and looked up bound feet on the Internet and did our own little research. It's amazing all the things I am learning too!