This is the beginning of Week 3 already. As I look back at Week 2, I can see improvement already. Our attitude is more professional, and we approach homeschooling with purpose. We can even take walks and reap the benefits of nature study by discovering plants and animals in our neighborhood.
One of my children finished her school work at 11:11am one day this week. This has only happened once before in our homeschool.
Putting together a USA puzzle helps with learning the 50 states.
The other child finished his work around noon one day on the first week. Finishing this early may be rare, but it proves that it is possible. When you stay focused, and do not take a ten-minute break after every subject, and do not stop to pet the cat every two minutes, you can finish it all early.
This really boosted their morale and mine, too. I feel drained when we crawl into the afternoon hours still trudging along with seemingly no end in sight. After all, homeschooling is supposed to be a lot more efficient than public or private school.
Lesson #2
We can squeeze two spelling lessons into one day, when necessary. Logic of English Essentials organizes lessons into five days. As such, it makes it very easy to know that if it is Wednesday, for instance, you should be on Day 3 of whatever week you are on.
They discovered a turtle eating a worm in our front yard.
There are 30 lessons total, with three levels: A, B, and C. To give you an idea, this week my son starts Lesson 18, Level C and my daughter starts Lesson 6, Level A. The key is for me to read the lesson ahead of time, understand the content thoroughly, so that I can explain it efficiently, and have all my flash cards ready for each child. We go through the scripted lesson in 10 minutes at the most, and tackle the workbook exercises in 5-7 minutes.
Because we had friends over on Friday, we did not homeschool with books. It was more of a P.E. day with nature walks and swimming at the pool, while still taking a violin lesson and taekwondo. I was motivated to blend five lessons of spelling in four days last week, and it worked. Good to know for the future.
Lesson #3
Teaching French, Latin, and Romanian gives results if you do it every day. The lessons do not take longer than five minutes each, but if they happen every day you will see results. Latin chants take two minutes and then we can read the story in that chapter. Or, we read ahead, too. They ask to read ahead because they like the stories.
Icecream works well as an incentive to stay focused.
French happens fast because I just read two short books to them and they love these funny books and illustrations. For Romanian, I tried to read them stories, but we find them rather infuriating. The moms in these stories tend to be emotionally inept, which baffles all of us. So we have taken to listening to a podcast which teaches Romanian in four minutes or so. It may not seem like much, but when you drill vocabulary daily, that is all you need.
