Original Post: September 23rd 2016
Holy mother of God help me. What have I gotten myself into.
This week has been HORRIBLE. Everything was bad. My 1st grader wanted nothing to do with anything school all week. My preschooler was in need of constand attention and my 9th grader suddenly forgot how to function on his own.
Everyone was tired, overwhelmed and just plain grumpy.
And for me the worst part was not the long grueling days, or the late nights grading and preparing for the next day; but the worst part was that when the weekend came and everyone could relax and hang out as a family and my husband was home I had to go to work.
Thankfully I only worked the Friday night and slept Saturday then spent sunday trying to figure out what went wrong.
Here’s what I adjusted:
My 9th grader needed to get up earlier. I had been letting him get up at 9 and start school at 930. He works better earlier. I asked him what he though of his curriculum that we were using. What did he like and not like. I asked him what he would like to learn more about.
On the day we go to co-op I lightened his homeschool load to small amounts of just his core subjects.
With him being up earier he was finished during my little one’s nap time so I could check and go over his work with him right then instead of late that night.
My daughter needed motivation. I took her to the park, bookstore and target to do school. Those turned out to be even more distracting than home (go figure).
I had been spending so much time on my 9th grader (because well I have to it’s not easy stuff!) that I didn’t really prepare the day for my 1st grader. We just kind of did what we felt like that day. So I found different activities and projects to incorporate with what we were learning and I made sure to have them set up and ready to go the night before.
I also did this with my preschooler. I would get several things for him to work on ready to go the night before. So I wasn’t standing around cutting, gluing and organizing while they ran wild.
That helped a lot. Writing it now it seems like those things should’ve been obvious to do but hindsight….
It’s still a lot of prep work for me and I definitely still haven’t found our ‘niche’ yet….