The worst thing about taking a day off from life, is that life goes on without you and it takes another two days just to catch up. My older kids were awesome and checked off almost everything on their chore list yesterday. My younger kids, who obviously need a lot more help and supervision, did not. Neither did I. My chore chart, in fact, is the worst looking one on the wall. (Yes, I have my own posted chore chart. Don't you?) The house is pretty clean, even with the refrigerator sitting in the middle of the kitchen, but my garden needs attention and my kids summer school and planning this upcoming year's school and of course, the one and only worst thing about having a large family: the laundry.
I truly hate laundry. If I ever win the lottery I will continue to be a stay-at-home mom and cook meals and clean house but the laundry will be sent out to be done by someone else and brought back all nice and clean and folded, AND this same service will make sure the clothes actually get put in the proper drawers and closets. Oh yeah.
So, after watching a whole lot of tv yesterday, I know am sore from not moving and have a headache and don't really want to do anything to catch up. So I'm blogging. Yay me!
My older children have gotten to the point where they keep the house mostly picked up and clean-ish on their own. They do the dishes and vacuuming and their own laundry and their bathroom, and that is a HUGE HUGE HUGE blessing. They'll take care of the dog, cat, and chickens, too. But it certainly doesn't mean that there isn't anything for me to do. One of the most important chores I am currently avoiding is planning school for next year. We school year round, but we still start in August, 'cause that really makes things easier. We are mostly wrapped up for last year. The older kids are finishing up math and I'm working on getting my little boys reading. My nine year old can't read yet. I'm not worried because he is a lot like his older sister, who I worked with for years and she couldn't read and couldn't read and couldn't and wouldn't read until all of a sudden I caught her reading. At age 10. I'm still not quite sure how that happened...
Warrior-boy HATED when I tried to teach him to read. So Right Hand Girl tried it. He goofed off too much. So finally, despite it's success with three of my older children, I ditched Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons and replaced it with The Reading Lesson Book. We've only done it 3 days so far but he seems to like it much better. So do Sweetheart and Little Big Boy, though the latter keeps insisting on adding a whole lot of other consonants whenever we try to blend the letters. Octavia just wants to eat it.
There are a lot of different ways to homeschool. I am eclectic with leanings toward Charlotte Mason and unschooling, very literature based and I also want my kids to be familiar with the classics and have lots of hands on opportunities. Basically, I want to do it all. Timberdoodle is my all time favorite homeschool store. If they have it, I want it. I LOVE their curriculum packages, especially how flexible they are. (They aren't paying me to say this; in fact I doubt they have any knowledge at all of this piddly little blog.) If I tried to get a basic curriculum package for each of my kids, even with those in the same grade sharing, it would cost me $1315. That's not even counting anything for Octavia, or any literature or electives. Or the things I would have to double up for more than one kid. I am not ragging on Timberdoodle's prices. They are actually really great. It's just expensive to use brand-new stuff for each of 8 children. Duh. The good thing is I don't need to have a fresh curriculum package every year for every kid. This year I am using Timberdoodle 8th grade as a guide to purchase used books for my two oldests, and getting Five in a Row and Beyond Five in a Row for the others, along with Life of Fred and Teaching Textbooks for math. That's the plan, anyhow. I'm hoping I can find all that I need under $600, so all I have to do is come up with about that much money. I don't have to get it all at once; I can work on it from August to December.
Warrior-boy HATED when I tried to teach him to read. So Right Hand Girl tried it. He goofed off too much. So finally, despite it's success with three of my older children, I ditched Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons and replaced it with The Reading Lesson Book. We've only done it 3 days so far but he seems to like it much better. So do Sweetheart and Little Big Boy, though the latter keeps insisting on adding a whole lot of other consonants whenever we try to blend the letters. Octavia just wants to eat it.
There are a lot of different ways to homeschool. I am eclectic with leanings toward Charlotte Mason and unschooling, very literature based and I also want my kids to be familiar with the classics and have lots of hands on opportunities. Basically, I want to do it all. Timberdoodle is my all time favorite homeschool store. If they have it, I want it. I LOVE their curriculum packages, especially how flexible they are. (They aren't paying me to say this; in fact I doubt they have any knowledge at all of this piddly little blog.) If I tried to get a basic curriculum package for each of my kids, even with those in the same grade sharing, it would cost me $1315. That's not even counting anything for Octavia, or any literature or electives. Or the things I would have to double up for more than one kid. I am not ragging on Timberdoodle's prices. They are actually really great. It's just expensive to use brand-new stuff for each of 8 children. Duh. The good thing is I don't need to have a fresh curriculum package every year for every kid. This year I am using Timberdoodle 8th grade as a guide to purchase used books for my two oldests, and getting Five in a Row and Beyond Five in a Row for the others, along with Life of Fred and Teaching Textbooks for math. That's the plan, anyhow. I'm hoping I can find all that I need under $600, so all I have to do is come up with about that much money. I don't have to get it all at once; I can work on it from August to December.
Meanwhile, I need to set up the course descriptions, attendance sheets, assignment sheets, and everything else in 5 binders, one for me and each of the four oldest. DonnaYoung.org has a lot of great free printables, and I'm using several of them, but I am enough of a control freak that I have to make my own pages so that they will be JUST right. Which is what I should be doing right now. Or painting the other chair in my garden, or making a supper meal plan, or thinning out our laundry (ptooie!), or exercising, or fixing the knobs on my kitchen cabinets, or doing the reading lessons with the boys, or letting one of the kids use the computer for math...
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