Mothering Many

My children are getting so excited about the approaching “specials” day. “Isn’t it today, Mama?” “Is today that day you said?” “Have you been to the hobby shop yet, Mom?” I think this may be the best idea I have had in my years of home-schooling.

Well, that combined with only writing three weeks of plans at a time. See, today slipped away from me. I was in the middle of something that I thought I had time to finish before school, but I got interrupted, and then by the time I had finished, the children were already off pursuing their own interests. They were working together on a project, and it was a marvelous thing, and I hated to pull them from it. Ordinarily, this would have messed me up for 2 months, but instead, it’s just going to put me a day off the calendar for 5 school days (including specials and my work day). And I did do a couple of assignments I had missed with the littlest scholars, and we’ll be watching a movie on DaVinci after lunch, so it will not be a total waste.

So, it went well. For the whole week, we ended up with one undone math lesson and one unread fairytale. Not bad at all. I’m totally satisfied with the amount of mental real estate we covered. Both pieces of undone work were from Friday, when LLATL takes a bit longer, because I have dictations and spelling tests to give. I’ll be keeping an eye on it, and if I find that not getting this done on Friday is the norm, I’ll adjust the plans to account for it.

If you’ve been reading my lesson planning posts, you might have noticed that Country isn’t mentioned very much. She is indeed schooling, but she has been an independent reader for a very long time, and she has her own set of lesson plans, which happen to be out of sync with the rest of the children. I’ll have to write plans for her in October, and I’ll talk more about her books at that time. Just so youdon;t think I sent her off to drug rehabilitation“>drug rehabilitation or something.

I’m talking about the total lunar eclipse I forgot about this morning! And also constellations! And meteor showers, and! and! and! Now, you know stuff like that is much easier to see with the proper equipment, right? With binoculars, the beauty of the celestial bodies is just almost overwhelming, and BuyTelescopes.com says they have the best astronomy binoculars. Myself, I’d rather have a telescope, but only because I can focus it on what the children need to look at, and then have them step up to it. That way, I can be sure we are all talking about the same thing!

Is this where I admit that I have never seen the rings of Saturn except in pictures? And that I really, really want to hear my children GASP when they do? I’m seriously considering this Meade 70AZ-AR Altazimuth Refractor for us. It’s not too terribly expensive, and…..I want it. I really, really want it.

If you remember, I mentioned that we will be studying stars this term. I asked the children what they wanted learn about, and they gave me several questions that interest them, such as:

• what is the lifecycle of a star?
• why are stars so hot?
• what is a shooting star?
• what do the colors mean?
• what is the shape of a star?
• what are some constellations?

Now it just so happens that I have a constellation experiment lined up already, but as you can see from the rest of the questions, I have my homework cut out for me, LOL!
I found a website today that may help me quite a bit with that. Now, you may think from the name that they only sell things, but that’s not true. I found several good articles there, as well as telescope reviews, forums and classifieds. Yep, they have classifieds, too. You can even find used binoculars for sale!

Now, if I had visited Astromart yesterday, I would not have sent my boys back to bed when they woke up with me at 6AM. I’d have pointed out the Total Lunar Eclipse, instead.

A few posts ago, I mentioned that we use Abeka for math. Let me just brag on that program. I really like it for a variety of reasons, but one of my favorite things about it is that it is largely self teaching. My kids can pick up their math books, read the explanations and proceed, for the most part, and this applies even to Country, who is in pre-Algebra.

Occasionally, they will need a bit of tutoring, and that’s when Abeka really shines. See, that “tutor” is me, and Abeka still does math the old fashioned way. We work from right to left. I’ve heard that in public schools they now work left to right, and I cannot figure out how they do that for the life of me. No wonder parents are needing to get online tutoring for their kids! Of course, the suspicious me wonders if the public schools do that just to keep parents out of the loop. They say they want parents to be involved, but then they make it very difficult to give kids homework help yourself.

Oops, I think I just revealed myself as a conspiracy theorist.