S/O-How do find time to fit in everything for Logic stage?

[HappyGrace]

I was reading LaughingLioness's response to a post (K-8 board: "top 3-5 things that worked well in your homeschool") and they are doing so many cool things! I feel like we are pushing to just get through the day and get the seatwork done, let alone fitting in cool outside classes and so on (we do a co-op one day/wk and Lego League).

[~Anna~]

I am just getting ready to start, but I am wondering how I am going to get everything done. I only have 1 child, but originally I had this idea that we would only be doing school for 3-4 hours a day and now I have seen all these great things I want to teach her and I am thinking she is going to think school is "too long".

[TippyCanoe]

nm

[mo2]

:bigear: I also am feeling totally overwhelmed right now.

[Karen in CO]

I think the answer is the same as the answer always is to these kinds of questions. You just can't do everything. You have to make priorities. With my ds in this stage, I focused on finding something, anything, that he would latch onto and care about. It turned out to be Japanese.

 

With my middle, we found music and fine arts. She loves tons of other things, but during the school year, we limit outside activities and inside enrichment to music or fine arts (group strings classes and art classes) plus one physical activity. The summer gives us time to branch out to other interests like a different art medium and a volunteer job someplace she loves.

 

My youngest loves dance right now, but who knows what she'll love in 4 years. I refuse to even think about that. Right now, we do a good job of the basics, and that is enough.

[redsquirrel]

What sort of cool things do you want to do that you aren't doing?

[KarenNC]

The only way we have been able to fit in the things we want to do with what we feel needs to get done is to go year-round, as well as make a move to splitting off teacher-led time and homework. we work together in the mornings and then she has a list of assignments that she is responsible for completing before a certain time (next day, end of the week, depends).

[Clear Creek]

I was reading LaughingLioness's response to a post (K-8 board: "top 3-5 things that worked well in your homeschool") and they are doing so many cool things! I feel like we are pushing to just get through the day and get the seatwork done, let alone fitting in cool outside classes and so on (we do a co-op one day/wk and Lego League).

 

What ages are your children? Unless I misread her signature, LaughingLioness's youngest child is the age of my oldest child. Logistically, I do not have the extra time that she does, so I can't compare what I do to what she does. She does not have young children getting into everything, making messes in every room, getting into fights, needing help finding socks, needing help getting a cup for a drink, needing help reaching the toilet paper, needing help using the microwave, etc. That stuff takes a lot of time every day! I imagine in four years when my youngest is nine that we might have time to do all the fun classes and stuff...until then, I am just trying to get through each day with my sanity intact. And maybe smiles on the kids' faces. All the fun extras will come when they are a bit older.

[lewelma]

As much as I never thought I would do it, I have found that I need to think in terms of "classes" to make sure I don't over-book my child. Most middle school kids have 6 classes with 6 hours (or so) spent on each per week. And 1 major after school activity. So if I want to do something fun that will take up a lot of time, I schedule it as a 1/2 class.

 

So for us, the science fair project counts as a half class. In order to do this fun thing, he needs 3 hours per week to do it, so something else has to go (for 3 months English became a 1/2 class; we dropped vocab and grammar and did WWS at half speed). If I want my ds to go to concerts, I put it into his music class, and make sure he still comes in at 6 hours max for the week (so perhaps miss a practice to give him time.)

 

Next term he will be taking technicraft (old fashioned home ec and shop), so that will count as a 1/2 class which will balance with his 1/2 class in Mandarin. But to count Mandarin as a 1/2 class, I cannot expect more than 3 hours per week. He has 2 hours of lessons, so we are talking 15 minutes of homework per day 4 days per week. If I want him to study more, I need to count it as a full class, and something else will have to go.

 

If I do the numbers, I keep myself realistic, and it helps me to make the hard choices.

 

Ruth in NZ

Edited June 13, 2012 by lewelma

[fluffybunny]

"top 3-5 things that worked well in your homeschool"

 

Can someone please show me where this thread is? I tried looking for it all over, but couldn't find it, and it does sound interesting!

[HappyGrace]

Can someone please show me where this thread is? I tried looking for it all over, but couldn't find it, and it does sound interesting!

 

Here you go!:

 

http://www.welltrainedmind.com/forums/showthread.php?t=393981

[HappyGrace]

As much as I never thought I would do it, I have found that I need to think in terms of "classes" to make sure I don't over-book my child. Most middle school kids have 6 classes with 6 hours (or so) spent on each per week. And 1 major after school activity. So if I want to do something fun that will take up a lot of time, I schedule it as a 1/2 class.

 

So for us, the science fair project counts as a half class. In order to do this fun thing, he needs 3 hours per week to do it, so something else has to go (for 3 months English became a 1/2 class; we dropped vocab and grammar and did WWS at half speed). If I want my ds to go to concerts, I put it into his music class, and make sure he still comes in at 6 hours max for the week (so perhaps miss a practice to give him time.)

 

Next term he will be taking technicraft (old fashioned home ec and shop), so that will count as a 1/2 class which will balance with his 1/2 class in Mandarin. But to count Mandarin as a 1/2 class, I cannot expect more than 3 hours per week. He has 2 hours of lessons, so we are talking 15 minutes of homework per day 4 days per week. If I want him to study more, I need to count it as a full class, and something else will have to go.

 

If I do the numbers, I keep myself realistic, and it helps me to make the hard choices.

 

Ruth in NZ

 

This is a great and practical idea, thank you!!

[HappyGrace]

My children don't really yet have a "passion" or even much of an area of interest (except Shakespeare in dd, and we're pursuing that), so maybe that is part of it. They do get little side interests from our studies, so we do some rabbit trails, but nothing we could base a whole class on.

 

So I feel like I just plan the subjects and we do them. Different years we have different priorities, depending on their strong or weak areas.

 

And it's still hard to fit everything in!

 

I've been so sick and on so much medication the past couple days I shouldn't even be posting-ignore me!

[Colleen in NS]

I feel like we are pushing to just get through the day and get the seatwork done, let alone fitting in cool outside classes and so on (we do a co-op one day/wk and Lego League).

 

How old is your oldest? I found that at the beginning of logic stage, there were quite a few new skills for me to learn to teach and for my son to learn (and my daughter is in that beginning phase right now). So sometimes it seemed as if I'd never get to do all the things I thought we should be doing. But eventually he learned how to find main ideas in paragraphs and how to put things on his timeline, etc. and then things got easier/took less time in a day to do. And I also dropped things or adjusted things as I figured out where a particular skill might be already being taught in another part of our day.

 

Maybe there are some areas where you can streamline your teaching or their independent work. Or spread things out over more weeks so that each day or week isn't feeling so pressured.

 

This is very much in contradiction to the extended school hours TWTM advocates with age; ...

 

Just a note that the hours and schedules in TWTM were put there at the request of the publisher. See this very down to earth article SWB and her mother wrote about TWTM and real life:

 

http://www.welltrainedmind.com/schedules/ (HappyGrace, this article might help you breathe a little more easily)

[HappyGrace]

Thanks, Colleen. Dd is pretty advanced so we haven't needed to spend time on basic study stuff. (I will TOTALLY have to do that in a few yrs with younger ds though!)

[lionfamily1999]

Last year, we didn't. Ds was... irksome and we moved away from TWTM for the last part of the school year. So far this year, 6th, things are going well. We have combined some harder classes (grammar and Latin) and his focus for writing is quality, not quantity. That has made a big difference in time, less writing is less whining, less whining is more working.

 

Iow, you won't know until you start. Then, start looking at the time wasters (whine whine whine gripe grumble) and then look for some way to mend it.

 

Math is whiney too, but the time I put in to keeping him moving saves us all an excruciatingly long day. We didn't change what we did, we changed how we do it. Also, ds is a procrastinator, your dc may not be procrastnators so what works and what doesn't will be different.

 

:lol: The best part of hsing is individualized education. Individualized education makes it so hard to give helpful advice.

[PeterPan]

nm

Edited June 17, 2012 by OhElizabeth

[laughing lioness]

In response to getting it all done and why we choose what we do:

First, decide what “all” is.

Next determine what “done” looks like.

This year was a good year. Like Oh Elizabeth said, I am giddy over the fact that it was. It’s been a difficult and painful couple of years and this year felt like roaring success. We have spent months on end doing grunt work like inventorying all of our worldly possesions (after a house fire) and going to funerals and drywalling and doing so much construction and demolition we could all hire out.

I have no interest in causing anyone heart ache because it looks like we got stuff done. I hope it’s an encouragement and not a milestone, because the beauty of homeschooling is that it’s yours, or mine, and hopefully we can encourage each other, resource each other, and build up each other by what we are doing or not doing.

The curriculum I listed was for 3 kids- they are all at extremely different ages/stages and use totally different curriclum, very bright in some areas and dumb in others. The only curriculum we did together was HOTMW, which they all loved. Personally, I did NOT find reading that book fun, but they did. Ce la vive. My kids do science, math, English, history, for. language. They do these subjects 3 ½ days a week. The days they work on those subjects, they work at them. The days that we are not at home, they are doing other things.

We also don’t do a LOT of things; amazing STEM projects, like Beth in WA, lots of weekly outside activities, sports, lap books, unit studies, projects. For one, I live in a construction zone and can’t cope with more mess. For 2, my boys would scoff at that. They want the facts, they want the study guide, they want to get it done and go outside and/ or write for hours on their novels, or draw or be read to, or watch a movie or play bionicles. I do buy tons of craft items for my ds 9- she is much more into that, but one of the big wins for her this year was decorating rocks. I bought her a 12 pack of sharpies and you wouldn’t believe the artwork that has been created from our copious field rock!

I also stick with a few curriculum suppliers. I don’t struggle with a lot of curriculum lust. I threw out 20 years of curriculum away 2 years ago after we were burned out of our house and that puts a different perspective on things, let me tell you. Along with that, I have a clear course of study in mind, I know what I want to do when and I do it, for the most part. I rarely change mid-stream. I don’t have the time or the money, or the brain space to do that. I’m also older (50 this summer) and have buried most of my family of origin (my dad and sister in the past 1 ½) and I realize that I don’t have all of the time in the world, that life is short and never, ever what you expect. I’m not trying to “cram it all in” but one of the things that I want to do is to live with passion, to not waste the time I have, to spend my life in Godly pursuits. That means I’m focused on what I do, do and it also means I don’t do a lot of things (watch t.v.- ever, etc). There are some major goals I have still to reach and if I don’t attend to them NOW they won’t get done.

All that to say, I don’t want to “waste time” homeschooling with curriculum or activities or academics that are not reaching our vision (for lack of better word without going all theological on you). I want to find the most effective pedagogy, most effective curriculum, resource them as effectively as I can, in the process allowing them the freedom that I never had; the freedom to know how to study, to be able to do whatever they choose (instead of what they are limited to by a mediocre education). I want to create a life-style of learning and Godly pursuit that is engaging and passionate enough to woo my children to want and desire something beyond themselves and beyond me (but that gets in to my entire belief system and what education’s about anyway, so I won't bore you).

I fit in the things that are vitally important to me first: lit and history. Math and science are vitally important to my dh- those are non-negotiable here. I also take advantage of the stuff that comes up that we wouldn’t have done on our own- like the Chem class in Tutoring Center- complete with labs and stuff. My ds 12 LOVED that class- he bombed the tests, that was a learning curve for him too- doing the homework/loving a subject and testing well in it aren’t always the same thing. He loved the science so much that this coming year he wants to take the pre-physics class AND read Apologia’s General science on his own. I’m not sure when that leaves us time for logic this year- he could certainly use it ; )

Edited June 17, 2012 by laughing lioness

[Another Lynn]

Lisa,

Thank you for sharing so honestly what you have suffered, what you have sacrificed, what you have achieved, and what you hope to. Reading about your reality and clear priorities is a reminder to examine mine.

 

Thank you. :001_smile:

[elegantlion]

We don't do everything either. We do what fits and after a horrible 7th grade year due to life, we had a decent year for 8th. The school year was more organic because it reflected who he was and what skills he needed to learn. I'm also a big believer if outside free time, that is when/where he found his passions. It's been building over the years, but this year I believe he found some real long term interests.

 

Like Lisa said, I try not to change curriculum. Every year we seem to have one subject that needs major tweaking and requires a whole new approach. changing mid-stream always throws us off. So we do not change what is even marginally working, we might tweak slightly. Research and planning requires a lot of time and focus. If I'm doing that I'm missing the time to work on something else.

 

Something I've worked on over the past two years is prioritizing. Ds's wants, my requirements, what skills are vital, what contents is important. When you have that outlined, it forces you to eliminate some good things. I remind myself I'm trying to create a lifelong learner, not one that will burn out by the end of high school.

 

Another good point is to work at the child's pace. Challenge but don't frustrate them. Once I found ds's correct working pace and level, I realized that we wouldn't be able to read 100 books in a year or do writing-heavy curriculum. It forced me to modify my long-term plans.

 

Pay attention to their interests. As we get ready to start high school, I have a good idea of where ds wants to go education wise. We've discussed those interests, languages and computers, and that has again forced me to modify our long-term plans. He's also fascinated with Japan and after two years I see it not as a passing phase. So our western-centered curriculum has moved eastward. This was not part of the plan, but it a part of who he is becoming. It doesn't mean we give everything else up for his interests, but I make sure they get worked into a tight high school schedule.

 

I also will continue to guard his free time because the computer stuff is his extra curricular. He has to have time to dabble and explore, there is no lesson plan that really suits what he is doing and I stay out of it for the most part.

 

It's a balance I've been working through for the last two years.

[HappyGrace]

ElegantLion-I think you hit the nail on the head w/ what is missing here-dd hasn't really come into her own with any interests yet, so it still feels very teacher driven. She is still young though. I do want to expose her to enough variety so she can develop some interest areas.

 

So w/out interests, it can be hard to prioritize. She prefers the content areas, but her math is weak so we need to spend time there.

 

Prioritizing in the logic stage years just looks very different from elementary, and I'm still trying to get a handle on it.

 

Lisa-thank you so much for sharing. It is a reminder to keep the relationships (with God and each other) number one. I was very inspired by both of your posts! I pray you and your family will be blessed this year.