One Day at a Time

We are, all of us, more than ready to be done with school for this year. Our Lad had his sixth birthday yesterday!! Some of his questions about turning six in the week leading up to the monumental day were, "Will I have to do school on my birthday?" and "When I'm six will I still have to do Kindergarten?" :) He's always looking for an angle to be NOT doing school. And I confess I'm not that "into it" right now either. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. After finally deciding within myself that we WILL be done with school by the last week in May even if we're not "done" it's been harder to really stay on task. The twins are growing good, and on target size/weight wise. I'm thankful for that, but it does make me feel quite heavy and clumsy and less patient than usual. So we've been "fudging" school a little bit. I've been tracing out some of the words on the Lad's writing pages to 1) Make it easier for him to get the letter formation and 2) Cut down on the mass hysteria that "too much" seat work causes in his little life. I've found a few tricks that have been helping us out in this last dash toward the finish. The boy, I've discovered, really likes to be out where the family is. That's not really an "ah-ha" moment, I could have told you that before, but keeping him on task with school while his little brother and sis run races through the house is WAY too difficult for me to manage right now. BUT one day I plugged in some good headphones into the laptop, parked him at the bar and let him do his work there. It was like a completely different experience for ALL of us!! I've also started to let him use markers, colored pencils or crayons to do both his numbers writing and cursive writing. Apparently making each sentence a different color makes writing much easier to actually do! I've broken up his seat work too. He usually has 3 pages to do for seat work and I let him choose 2 to do before recess and one to finish up after. So far that has been cutting down on the meltdowns that result in us still trying to get through school at 4pm! I admit that this whole homeschooling adventure is an experiment in what works for US. I'll never be the mom who has all of her school supplies in perfect order, or every day of the year mapped out in excellent lesson plan form. I'm always going to "cheat" a little here and there to just "make it through" and I'll break from the 'norm' to try things differently and see if my littles take to it any better. We will be starting the experiment afresh with first grade in a few months. Plus 2 new family additions. But I'm not going to start thinking about all of that right now. Today it's just enough that we made it through school, and tomorrow is another day.