Habits

I recently read the book The Power of Habit and it has me thinking a lot about my habits, and how they are forming my life.  According to this author, every habit (which includes much of our behavior) consists of a cue, a response, and a reward.  Sometimes it’s hard to tease the three apart, to figure out what the cue is that triggers the habit, or what the reward is from a seemingly unrewarding behavior (for example, why do I yell at my kids?  it doesn’t make me feel any better when I do, and it rarely elicits a good change from them).  Today I noticed that by changing my habits just a little—taking a shower before eating breakfast rather than after, switching up the order in which I do things in other, even smaller ways….I ended up feeling energized by the change, and found myself changing other more damaging habits (usually I somehow end up sitting on the couch all morning, instead I was up playing with the baby, cleaning, and I came up with six different ideas for blog topics too).
Another habit I’m trying to change is my tendency to do things unrelated to the boys’ lessons during lesson time, in the between minutes when no one needs me.  I get swept up in reading my current book, checking Facebook, trolling Pinterest.  I want to try to only do things related to lessons during lesson time (in terms of reading, writing, using media)- I have been less successful at making this habit switch so far, but when I do succeed with this to any extent I find that I’m more patient with the boys when they get frustrated at a difficult lesson, or when they lose focus.  Instead of having to pull myself away from something wholly unrelated to lessons straight into a crisis already in progress, I find I either sit thinking quietly and notice right away that they are getting into difficulty OR I read or do research related to lessons, and their crises don’t feel unrelated when they interrupt what I’m doing, it’s all part of the same project.  It was easier when I could still knit, that was something I could do with half of my attention and I never felt the need to ask them to wait longer than it took me to reach the end of my row, before I was ready to help with the tricky bits of their work.

Back To It

The best part about getting back into daily lessons (as of Jan 2nd, even though Sweet Hubby is still on vacation from *his* school, if we didn't start I was sure we wouldn't finish the math and history curricula by March 31st) was watching Primo and Radish collaborate on filling in their timeline of history.  We asked them to find between 5 and 10 important events from the medieval periods that we've studied so far this year, and add them to the timeline (a purchased one which we have not yet cut into pieces to mount on the wall-- I tried having a mounted timeline when the boys were small, but our house doesn't have any accessible wall long enough for even a significant portion of it to fit).  At first it was slow-going and they argued a little about sharing the resources (Story of the World, Kingfisher History Encyclopedia).  With a little help from me, and from Sweet Hubby too, they settled down and it was sweet to watch them discuss which events to include. 
Next best was how enthusiastic they both were about trying BBC's Dance Mat Typing.  After lessons were officially over for the day, they each returned to this 'game' and played some more.  The only downside is, they were able to progress quite far in just one day, which tells me that this free online game-style typing instruction is not meaty enough for us to use all semester as their touch-typing curriculum.  So the hunt continues, for a program that will last a bit longer, and give them a good strong introduction to touch typing (or, re-introduction in Primo's case-- he tried Typing Instructor for Kids when he was 7, but he found it frustrating).
I'm thinking about what to do with our weekly schedule for the rest of the year, so that the boys have enough time to work on math, science, history and English, while also spending at least a little time on Latin, geography, music, art, and now typing.  My ideas so far are either to schedule one 'special' lesson per day (as there are 5 of them and 5 days in our school week) or to save them all for Fridays, and do just math and 'extras' that day.

Schedules

We’re on day three of our month-long ‘December Break’.  After more than three months straight of 'lessons’ nearly every weekday morning, there is a holiday atmosphere around taking our mornings off.  I still insist that we all get dressed, make beds, and brush our teeth first thing.  And we always make ‘December Goals’ before this break, outlining some plans so that the month doesn’t fly by with nothing to show for it (in the past, the boys’ goals have mostly had a lot to do with hot chocolate and sledding, this year I asked them to include at least one thing they want to learn more about, and one thing they want to learn how to do or in which they want to improve their skills).  It’s not suddenly anarchy around here.  But we watch an episode of Doctor Who in the middle of the morning.  The boys open one of the twenty-four ‘literary advent calendar’ books.  Hours of drawing, playing and reading ensue.
Schedules and timing are one of the things about our homeschool that I’m always looking to refine and perfect.  Our yearly schedule is: the school year starts May 1st for the two boys (although Radish started lessons the January after he turned 4, so his ‘school year’ as far as moving up to the next level of writing and math is off from our school year as a family), we go three months and then take a month off—theoretically, although things get complicated around summer camp starting in July which is supposed to be an ‘on’ month for us, and sometimes I give them their standardized tests in the first week of April, although it is one of our three vacation months (April, August, December).  Our daily schedule is more fluid, although paper-and-pencil lessons mostly fall between 9 a.m. and 1 p.m.  Lots of things that ‘count’ fall outside of these hours (reading, music lessons, physical education), but I try to hold our mornings free from outside activities because I found in our first years of homeschooling that if I’m not strict about this, we don’t have time to do much of anything academically.  This has meant, over the past few years, that we’ve missed out on a lot of things that are going on in the homeschool community, and which begin either in the morning or too early in the afternoon for us to manage to get there.
Being way off from the public school in our yearly schedule doesn’t bother me a bit, and the kids don’t mind except when someone asks them what grade they’re in and they have to think about it for a second.  The daily schedule is different-- every once in a while something very cool is happening in the morning or early afternoon in our homeschool community, and I have to stop and think about whether to make an exception to my rule about ‘morning is for us at home, doing lessons’.  Sometimes I bend a little, for a one-time thing like a field trip or for an academic co-op that meets often.  Right now we’re doing ‘Friday lessons’ with some good friends, as a kind of a mini co-op (just our two families).  It seems worthwhile to make an exception for this, because I want my guys to have the experience of doing academic and project work with other really bright kids. 

Standards

One of the things I find both interesting and challenging about homeschooling is figuring out when the boys' work is "good enough".  In the beginning, with Primo, I tended to expect too much from him in his lessons.  It was lucky for him that I started using the Story of the World history curriculum, which includes review questions and sample narrations for each story.  Before that, throughout most of his first grade year, I read ancient history books with him and then expected him to be able to answer very detailed questions and to write long, complex narrations.  I don't think it was much fun for him.  Once I saw how simple the SOW questions and narrations were, I dialed it way back.

These days, though, I often worry that I'm not asking enough of Primo and Radish academically.  For example, I have been allowing Radish to read and teach the history stories *instead* of writing narrations.  And I have Primo doing work from a number of different sources, but not doing too much in-depth reading, research, or writing.  I'm not sure if this next thing is a good example, but on Wednesday (our last day of lessons before taking an extended break), I asked the boys to collaborate on a timeline of early exploration of the New World.  Granted, this was the last lesson of the morning, on the last morning of lessons before the break.  But what they handed me was written using just a couple of sources, and included only a few of the people I thought they'd write about.  I accepted it at the time-- they were so touchingly proud of themselves, they thought they had done excellent work.  When I looked over one of the books they had used, later that day, I was surprised at how much they had left out.

And that's where the challenge comes in-- were they doing appropriate work?  Should I have encouraged them to dig deeper, or was the work 'good enough'?  I know there are external 'norms' of what kids in general are supposed to be capable of at each age or grade level (educational 'standards'), but I tend to believe that ignoring these standards is one of the joys of homeschooling-- I (theoretically at least) know my own kids and what they're capable of.  I guess my hesitation comes in because I don't know if I should expect them to work at the limit of their capacity, or to do just what feels pretty comfortable and easy to them.  Hitting just the right amount of difficulty in their work is, well, difficult.