Switching it up....

We had a wonderful school day today

 And no, not because we actually did some crafts and used our scissors

 

 

 

And not because we made tepees (although that was extra fun)

 

 And no not because we took lots of pictures today of our tepees.

 

 

 

Today was wonderful because :

 

1. I started my day in the word. Even when my almost 2 year old woke me up at 5am this morning, I still took the time at 7am to sit down and be with Him before we really started our day.

AND.. 

2. We totally flipped our schedule!!  I know probably a lot of you newbie homeschoolers (that includes myself) are probably yelling NO don't do that! But really, I say why not?

     We started out the school year doing "circle time" or together time first and then in the afternoon, while baby was napping we would do our individual time with mommy, one on one, one at a time.  Well that worked okay for the first couple weeks but then I noticed the together time around the table was becoming very stressful with the baby there.  Before we knew it she was standing on the table, center of attention!  So my thinking was it had to be the schedule, so I flipped it.

     We then made together time while the baby was sleeping and individual time in the morning.  And again this had worked okay for the last few weeks but last week and some the week before I was noticing that it was really stressing me out and I was becoming frustrated and almost angry with the kids.  Libby, the baby, would be running around grabbing all sorts of different toys, taking whatever food she could reach, and come up the stairs from our basement with pen marker all over her body, all while I was trying to have that individual important time with that one child that I never ended up getting.

     So here we are back to square one.  I changed our schedule back!  We get up in the mornings, have breakfast, clean up our breakfasts, do our few daily chores (making beds, brushing teeth, getting dressed etc.) and then we come back together for "circle time".  And I also have made a change to our circle time. I completely took out one thing we were doing for calender, which was more of independent lots of writing work, and we now just do it all together on the board.  I believe this has truly helped my sanity as well!  Then we will have lunch, clean up, and I will put Libby down for a nap.  Once she is down for her nap we do our reading assignments, and then they each get 30 minutes individually with mommy to work on their math, language arts, handwriting and spelling.   

 

     Now will everyday go as smoothly and great as today?  No, I can promise you it will not!  But I now know I have a structure that is working for the time being and hey if a few months down the road it isn't working anymore you know what I will do?  SWITCH IT UP AGAIN!  

 

     Don't be afraid to change things homeschool mommas, that is the beauty of homeschooling, we have that freedom.  It won't damage us or our kids to switch things up, it just keeps things alive.  And who knows maybe it will also help our kids be able to accept change easier, just maybe.

     

    Lastly I just wanted to leave a couple more pics of M and Libby since there weren't many in the first few of them both.  Oh what fun they had today!