School

Paul's getting into the swing of school these days.
We start the school day with letters; he does his printing exercises while Giselle does her cursive exercises and they race to see who can finish first (with me regularly saying "slow down and pay attention to your own work"). Next, Giselle moves on to her spelling/language arts and Paul works on a Preschool workbook during that time. Then, Paul is released for a half hour of recess while Giselle works on her math. Paul is welcome to sit-in on school during geography but he's not required to, although he IS required to participate in all of our science and craft work that we do. Since we're using the activity book with Story Of The World this time, there's work for both Giselle and Paul to do while I'm reading aloud. I've taken to reading the chapter once through first while Giselle just listens and Paul colors, then I read it again while Giselle does her activities. Afterward I quiz her on the review questions and then we're pretty much done for the day. Sometimes there's additional reading or longer science projects but not always.
Depending on how long everything is taking, lunch is either in the middle of school or at the end. That's another great advantage of homeschooling - if they get the work done quickly then school is done quickly, but if they need more time on a subject we are at liberty to take however long is needed to learn it completely. There's nothing keeping us from working ahead if something is easy and there's nothing keeping us from going slow if something is hard. We've taken a long time on basic, 0-10 multiplication so that Giselle really knows what she's doing before we start doing double-digit multiplication. And I'm now slowly bringing in division too since she's gotten pretty solid on the basic multiplication.

This morning, Paul learned how to change the toner in the copier/printer while Giselle did recreational reading. This was after they went on a camping trip in the backyard. I think that Paul's going back to the campsite when he's done with school for the day! With cold weather coming along in another month we'll be doing PE daily inside - jumping jacks for 5 minutes between every subject - instead of just running wild outside for 5 min between each subject.

Time for math so I gotta go.