Homeschool Begins

This week we started homeschool. Sunday we spent a good amount of time setting up rules and rewards and talking about how the day would go. The kids will earn screen time based on getting their work done, their attitude while doing it and how much effort they put in it. They can use the screen time that day or save it up for the weekend. Then we also have a punch card that they earn punches on by doing some form of exercise and doing their daily chores. When they get a certain amount of punch cards filled, we are going to buy them another remote for the xbox so they can play games together. I am all about the bribery here. These incentives seemed to help but of course there were still issues, I expected the first week to be rough.  

Monday morning the boys and I started our first day of school off with a run. The girls joined us for our cool off walk. I took a shower and then we had to get our traditional pictures. Except this year I decided as their teacher, I should be part of them too.

After the pictures we dived right in to school and overall it wasn't completely terrible. Oddly enough, Steven had a great attitude for the first day and was my easiest kid and Ben, on the other hand, got super emotional over everything and was my toughest kid. The girls were mostly ok and they were done by 11am (they took a good snack/wiggle break halfway through). The boys finished around noon and also took a snack break and some wiggle breaks. We pretty much followed that same timing the rest of the week so I am hopeful that we can continue to start our days at 8am so we can be done by the afternoon. I know that will be harder when it gets darker and colder outside.

After homeschool I was able to do my usual house cleaning and pick up my groceries. I was happy to see that I could still fit all my usual Monday things in after homeschool. That evening Grams and I went shoe shopping with Lucy because her tennis shoes were getting holes in the toes. Then we stopped at Dairy Queen for ice cream. I got a Snicker Doodle Cookie Dough Blizzard which was pretty dang good. 

On our second day of homeschool Ben did a lot better but Steven's excited attitude about homeschool had already faded and he was back to his usual antics. Steven just really struggles with putting effort into his work and listening when being shown his mistakes and how to correct them. He just wants to rush through it all and be done, regardless if he is doing it correctly or well. That caused him to not earn as much screen time as he could have. 

After homeschool that day we had to take Grams to the airport so she could fly back to Arizona. I definitely felt her absence after she left. I miss having someone to watch my silly shows with me, Tyler certainly doesn't, and I miss having someone to talk to during the day and run errands with me. But she will be back next month so at least it's not goodbye for too long.

The rest of our week with homeschooling was pretty much the same sort of issues. Just trying to get the boys to really try- read directions and instructions and put forth their best efforts. Trying to get Ben to keep his emotions in check so that he doesn't get upset (or freeze up) when he doesn't understand something. The girls had similar issues with getting frustrated or upset when something felt like too much work or hard so got to work on them too.

The positives for homeschooling this week were- the less stressed schedule, having the boys come with me on my runs, teaching Ben how to play the piano, doing a read aloud with all the kids during lunchtime, having the boys do coding lessons with their dad, having Steven help me with dinner, snuggling on the bed with the girls to do a reading lesson and having "recess" with friends. On Thursday we did a beach day with a few friends and that was a lot of fun. On Friday I had a lady from the neighborhood over, she has triplet boys Penny's age (they were in Jr Kinder last year in the class next to Penny's). It was nice getting to know her better and fun to watch Steven playing games with her boys and entertaining them.

The only other thing that happened this week was tie dying shirts for our yw's activity Wed night. This was a lot of fun except I had another annoying moment with my counselor. I had told her not to bring a back up snack to the activity that night and that it would be ok if the girl in charge forgot the snack. The girls would survived with no snack, honestly. When I got to the activity she came up to my car and excitedly told me that the girl in charge had remembered to bring a snack which is great. BUT then she tells me that she had brought a back up snack anyways even though I had told her not to. I do not know why she can't just listen and leave the snack thing alone. And then to just admit that she went against my advice when she could have got away with not telling me that she had done that. That was the real kicker. Ugh. I'm so frustrated with her.