Bravely Sharing a Bit of Reality

A lovely blog reader recently emailed me with a question. I thought one or two of you might be interested in my answer, so I’m posting it here.

Q: I am curious what your schedule has looked like this year. You had a sketch back at the beginning of the year. I feel like I am constantly losing to the clock. There just never seems to be enough time. I am not a stickler to 20 minutes here or we have to be at the desks at this time. But am wondering if I need to be. Writing and Science seem to get left out, and Math and workbooks seem to take center stage. Open for suggestions…

A: You're singing my song. We've had very little routine this year. I have an idea of what I want to get done each week. Doing the weekly report on my blog at the end of each week has really helped me keep on track. Classical Conversations was a God-send this year. Other than that, I just fly by the seat of my pants, unfortunately. I'd really like to have a solid routine, but... the boys are chaotic, I'm undisciplined, the baby's schedule is all over the place, and my hubby has been in and out of the house all day every day for the last 6 months (unemployed/self employed).

It helps to have everything handy in our living room. At the beginning of the week I try to grab all the books we will need and stack them by theme (literature, fine arts, science, history, miscellaneous library books). I put bookmarks in the encyclopedia-type books so I can immediately find the pages. All our school-related videos go in a stack on top of the tv cabinet. I have a holder with all our school-related CDs on top of the cabinet as well (CC memory work, poetry memory work, Bible memory songs, hymns, geography songs, Latin songs...). The desk behind the couch holds all our other books.

There is absolutely no order to what we do each day. Does that surprise you? :) I grab one thing at a time and we just do it. If there is something we haven't gotten to in the past day or two, I try to start with that. When I have to get up to deal with the 4 yo or baby, I hand a book (science, history, whatever) to the other boys and say, 'Read this until I come back.' If I leave them to do anything independently other than reading (such as following along with the Latin CD), it is usually chaos when I return to the room. So they do A LOT of reading. And videos. Math used to be a huge struggle (couldn't get uninterrupted focus time). We just started using Teaching Textbooks on the computer, and a miracle has occurred. I now have to ask them to *please stop doing math* so we can work on something else.

I TRY to buckle down and be really focused as soon as Lola goes down for a nap, but she hasn't been sleeping all that well recently so I can't count on any length of time for that. When we go somewhere in the car (which isn't very often these days!), I grab the CD folder and just rotate through the CDs for as long as we are driving.

So, you see, I'm not the person to ask. {wry grin} But we've been making progress, and that's the important thing. Russ goes back to work this next week, and I'm praying Lola settles down into a routine soon. I'm guessing we'll find our rhythm...about the time summer starts.