A GOOD DAY

I have 5 + 2 +1 (5 birth kids + 2 son in laws + 1 grand baby) and nothing is ever as simple as it seems.

organization, organization, organization.

It has taken us 2 weeks to find our rhythm. Today was a good day at our home education table. Granted this morning I was so exhausted, that the family left me alone to sleep in until 9 am. They played quietly on the computer to pass the time. I needed the sleep so first and foremost. Frequently I have to remind myself :"do not neglect your own health, like the airline attendants say, put your own oxygen mask on first".

that being said. what are our priorities? what are our goals? what is our tolerance level?

Priority: Knowledge
Goal: Love Learning
Objective: Age appropriate completion of the education program
Tolerance: 90%, +/- 10%

for me, 100% mastery was my expectation for the last 2 weeks, guess what, that is unreasonable. and I am OCD about it but I have to LET GO and accept that there may be only 60-78% mastery and only 60 -80% subjects completed each day.

I printed out the weekly plan last night, I printed out the materials for each subject. I realized that I do not have an item for a class, so I 'shoved it to later in the week" and I brought something else up. We were making such good progress in areas last week by chunking, that I planned for it. Some lessons just flowed into the next lesson. However, as we were moving through more difficult subjects, we move until I see Magnus has lost energy, and we put it away. The beauty of the virtual system, no sense in beating a dead horse. Put it away, and move on. However, we did stumble on to two Easter eggs today. One was in the Study Island we switched to game mode and he was much more motivated to continue to play and the second wonderful surprise was San Francisco Symphony helped us out tremendously in our music lesson.
Our goals this month are time management. He took 80 minutes to write his spelling words while I was cooking dinner. When I sat down next to him and wrote them, (parallel play) in the same way that I expected (modeling), I demonstrated that it should only take 2 minutes.

Tomorrow we will practice it again. Sometimes learning coaches will spend a lot of time on just getting a rhythm going, and not as much on actually 'learning'. Magnus and I are having to step back, and realize that I have to teach him how to study, and eventually we will move on to academics in a direct (cooperative) approach.