in the thicket

Three months worth of plans and once when planning worked for me

I've tried so many different cleaning and organizational systems over time! I know there is really no perfect system, and that the system isn't really the problem, the problem is me not doing what I intend to to. Or not even having a plan for what I want to do, just having some vague "oh, I should do that" thoughts that flitter through my mind occassionally.

The girls and I were so proud of ourselves this summer. We made a plan, and we stuck with it! Our vehicle kept getting really gross last year, like gross to the point of "I should go park in the corner of the parking lot because I don't want people to see inside when I open the doors or look in my windows!" kind of gross. And I can't blame the girls entirely, there was a lot of stuff tossed on the front seat too, and that's my territory! We are usually so tired when we get home that we were just lazy about taking our stuff in the house and getting rid of trash.

Well, at the start of the summer, we spent an afternoon of really cleaning the car out well. And we decided that we WOULD keep it clean. Guess, what, we did! For most of the summer, about three months! Bathing suits/towels/books etc all came inside when we got home. I stopped giving them snacks in the car, that helped a lot with trash. The girls both kept noticing and commenting, "Mommy, our car is STILL CLEAN!" We were pretty impressed with ourselves!

There's a sad end to this tale... things got messy/gross again. Still not sure why, but I think we need to revisit that goal again, because I know we can do it! And they know it, too. It's not always fun or easy, but boy it feels better to ride around in a not-nasty car. We're not going to impress anyone with our snazzy 14 year old (yep) Ford Explorer, but at least when it's clean we won't be grossing anyone out!

Three months seems to be a nice chunk of time, to me. A season, really. And there are different levels of activity that I can manage in different seasons. I think that this winter will be a good time for me to focus on getting some projects done around the house, since we are home more and outside less. Here's some tentative plans for some bigger projects I'd like to tackle. If I get any of them done, maybe I'll blog about them here!

January goals:

Recipe/menu planning: Reorganize current menu binder to hold only those recipes that I really use, and put in a bigger binder. Come up with a list of family favorite meals and where I find the recipes (in binder or cookbook- I can't be bothered to copy recipes that I have in a cookbook, unless I decide to get rid of the cookbook!) Make it pretty and useful. (Wish I could do something like Sarah from Memories on Clover Lane did and make an actual cookbook, but that's a bit much for me right now!)

Bill/Budget organization: I've looked at a couple of different systems, and I'm intrigued by this binder method of filing bills and planning for bills, seen here... and I like Sarah at Clover Lanes simple approach to tracking spending in her budget notebook, too. (These are really two different things, and I should start doing both!)

February goals:

Painting: I have lots of painting projects... two bathrooms upstairs need to be painted, and also both girls have furniture that could use a coat of paint. This would probably keep me busy the whole month! Not sure if it would be bad to paint when it's cold outside, hope not!

March goals:

Pictures: I have never tackled organizing our old photos, and need to research how I want to handle this. Also, I don't regularly print photos for us to enjoy, or the scrapbook pages I've created over the years, so I need to come up with a plan or routine for doing this. And I would like to put some pictures in the frames I've purchased and never filled!

Purging: Revisit closets, drawers and spaces that haven't been addressed for a while in preparation for spring cleaning in April/May. I tend to regularly do this with some parts of my house (kids' toys, drawers in kitchen) but I need to do this in my attic and bonus room as well.

Okay, I think that's plenty to keep me busy for a few months! I have other projects that I don't want to assign to a particular month, though...

Other projects to fit in:

-Create a canopy to go over my oldest's bed, out of tulle- something sweet and girly, a DIY project. Also would like to create a bulletin board (cover with fabric?) for her, and change out some artwork in her room and update photos. (Probably good projects for February and March!)

-Encourage my husband to organize tools and such in the garage- it's a mess out there!

-Thrift and search for better dressers to replace ones falling apart in our bedroom and for additional storage in other parts of the house. Maybe paint them, so possibly do this in February.

I'll be thrilled if I do even some of these things within this time-frame. They all should be done, but I am usually a lot slower to tackle projects than I'd like to be. Maybe this will be the kick in the pants I need!

 

 

Blowing the dust off and making some changes!

After considering what my blogging goals are, I've decided to make some changes! I have just created a blog where I will post specifically about homeschooling and family life, located at Dogwood Homeschool. Homeschooling is an important part of my life and certainly occupies a lot of my thoughts, time and energy. It is not my only interest, however, so I hope that this blog will become a place where I can write about my own personal interests... books, home arts (decorating, cooking, celebrations), Christianity, my quest to take better care of myself, parenting issues that don't specifically pertain to homeschooling, and maybe even some photography and digital scrapbooking again if I can fit that into my life!

So, if you are specifically interested in my homeschooling posts, you might want to follow my new blog. I'm writing for myself here, not any specific audience, and I anticipate that some months I might write a lot about books and other months I might blog about home decorating projects. Some days I might have the occassional deep thought or two that I want to get down in written form. Who knows! I just need a place where I can explore my own interests and passions that are not necessarily "child-centered" (though so much of my life really is, it's just the season!)

I will be "cleaning up" this blog shortly and I hope to update the header and overall look. I will leave all my posts here for the current time (including homeschooling posts) until I can figure out if it's possible to move them or not. Otherwise, I will just move forward with posts on this blog and hope that I will have a chance to write here regularly.

 

Homeschool planning for dummies

There's nothing fancy or extensive going on with my planning these days, I've pretty streamlined it down to this. Stacks. Stacks of stuff, along with just a piece of paper with quick notes, to-do list and also my around the house to-do list. Basic, basic, basic.

This is a rather dim, blurry picture, but I think it illustrates my point. See, nothing fancy! I realize I could do workboxes, but this is really a tool for me more than Charlotte. This is my kitchen counter next to the dining table where we do our work. Despite my effort to move our "homeschool" upstairs to our bonus room, we still find ourselves sitting at the kitchen table, probably because it is bright, sunny and near the art cabinet. I store all the homeschooling materials in my kitchen cabinet above my phone, we have typically kept papers, phone book, etc there because it is not easily reached from the kitchen area for dishes and such. So, it works.

Charlotte is overall doing well with everything, and whenever I get worried about something she will surprise me about a week later by mastering whatever I was fretting over. So, a reminder to myself: Don't worry so much!

The backbone of our homeschool, and what keeps us moving foward, is our Ambleside Online readings. Charlotte is in Year 1. We had a really chopped up October, so we are finishing up Week 7, moving into Week 8, though we should be further along. But, it's not a race, so that is OK. Charlotte enjoys her readings and asks for them, though we are still introducing narration. (Note to self: don't fret.) Gwendolyn just enjoys stories, period. We have many of the Five in a Row books, so those are read frequently.

Charlotte's favorite subject is math, and she is now enjoying Singapore Math 1a. We are moving steadily but slowly, and should be wrapping up 1a in February. I admit I am a bit shocked to look ahead at 1b and see multiplication (really? for first grade?) but I am viewing this as an introduction, not that she is expected to master it. (I didn't learn multiplication until third grade, myself- I distinctly remember being expected to recite multiplication facts to my third grade teacher aid!). She enjoys it and is learning, though.

Handwriting has been her least favorite subject, and is an area where she struggles a bit. But we are seeing improvement. She is desperate to start learning cursive, and I have explained my expectations for where her handwriting needs to be before moving to that (appropriate use of upper/lowercase letters, spacing, neat and legible- and not just that way in her handwriting book!) Once again, I didn't learn cursive until third grade, but I don't think that Charlotte is willing to wait that long!

We also do nature study and art study, though not as systematically as I would like. I still want to find nice sturdy nature notebooks for us all (I want one too!). And tomorrow I finally hope to start one of the activities from the lovely Fall Hearts and Trees Activity kit that I ordered... I'm planning to start with the study of Jan Van Kessel's print. I hope to start working on the fall bunting this week as well- Charlotte has been spending lots of time "sewing" recently- crafting little bags out of felt, using embroidery thread to stitch. All very cute things, though who knows how long it will stay together, considering she doesn't really knot anything! I will help her with that, of course.

Gwendolyn loves to join us at the table, and she likes to practice writing her letters or numbers, or do counting activities, or just paint with watercolors. I am going to start a letter of the week activity with her soon, though. She knows all her letters, so it will just be some fun reinforcement, I hope!

So, that's how I'm keeping track of what we're up to. Stacks of stuff. Maybe I'll upgrade at some point... a bookcase to put my stacks on would certainly be nice! (Maybe a modified workbox system, but more for organizational purposes!)

Winter 2010 Homeschool thoughts and plans

I come up with such exciting titles for my blog posts, don't I? This is in contrast to some of the lovely and fun titles of books we've read for homeschool this fall and winter. Titles like "All Those Secrets of the World," "Snowflake Bentley," and coming up this week, "Truman's Aunt Farm."

Charlotte is in kindergarten, so I haven't been spending hours and hours planning. I did realize over Christmas, however, that I needed to plan *a bit more* than I had been in order to get more out of the experience. (In other words, if you think you are reading the blog of someone who has it all together, and has some great wisdom to impart, you are not... I'm just sort of stumbling through this!) We use "Five in a Row" which is somewhat "open and go" but since I request the books from the library, I do need to do some advanced planning in order to get the book from the library and any "go along" books that look fun.

I decided I needed a planner that is online, since I invariably lose bits of paper, plus I wanted to be able to have a place to save links and such. I ended up deciding to use Google Calendar, to put each book as an "event" for the week, and then save the info I wanted to refer to in the "event details." Works great, and better yet, it is free!

We are also working through "Reading Made Easy" by Valerie Bendt. We took over a month off from formal lessons, and I think that both Charlotte and I were surprised when I opened the book and she was reading words before I introduced the new word sounds. It has been SO much fun to see her reading skills develop, though she is still definitely an early reader (and lacks confidence a bit, I think.) Still, I get a kick out of asking her to read signs when we are out and about and that she can do it! What an exciting world is about to open up for her.

For handwriting, we are using "Handwriting without Tears." My dilemma with that has been that she has been writing since she was 3 years old, and had picked up her own "approach" along the way. But mostly she uses uppercase letters only. After looking ahead to the next books (We are in "Letters and Numbers for Me" I decided to let her quickly finish out the uppercase letters, and then we will slow down and work through the lowercase letters, since forming them are new for her. She recognizes them all by sight of course. Then we can work in the "Printing Power" workbooks and do copy work, fun things like copying a short poem and illustrating it. (I will be looking to Charlotte Mason resources for ideas for that!)

At this point in time, we don't have a math curriculum. I'm leaning toward a curriculum called "Math on the Level" that is very flexible, but covers everything you need to teach grades K-8. It has a wonderful support group online, and I like that it really does integrate applied learning. Also, the review is basically what the child needs, and reinforces concepts on an as-needed basis. (I am probably not explaining that well, there is a system to it, the parent can gauge where the child is and determine how much review they need, etc.) It would be a big purchase, though, so I am waiting a bit on that. For now, we are doing applied math lessons from Five in a Row and playing math games, plus talking about math in every day contexts.

Gwendolyn is learning her alphabet right now, and just loves to read books and play at this point. She is going to be four in April, so that is just fine with me! When FIAR books are appropriate for her (not too long) she listens into those.

Both girls spend a LOT of time doing art projects, usually painting or coloring with markers. Pretty much every single day! Also they love the usual things like playdough, Crayola "Wonder" coloring books, regular coloring books, coloring on our chalk board. It's so fun to watch the changes in their artwork. Gwen's drawings of people are getting more detailed, and Charlotte's are quite detailed now. And Charlotte has also taken to painting "landscapes" which are fun- yesterday she painted a sunset over the ocean! (Okay, a bit cliched, but hey I'm tempted to frame it and hang it in her bathroom, it would actually match!)

We are VERY on the go, which can be a challenge for me to stay on top of homeschool AND house related stuff. I think at some point... perhaps soon... we need to start sticking close to home more. But we are blessed with some great friends, and it's always fun to do outings with them. And they are usually educational, like heading to a local museum or park. (I think a park is educational!) We are fortunate to have a huge variety of different groups to chose from, and really my challenge is to make the hard decisions about which ones we should be involved with. I know there is a very real risk of getting over committed.

The girls have also been enjoying ice skating lessons! The first week was a disaster (one instructor! too many kids!) but the last two weeks have gone better. Gwendolyn is still not thrilled to be on the ice, but Charlotte really clicked with it last week and is actually skating! I was also glad to have a chance to chat with other moms while she was skating, since they are offering lessons specifically for homeschooling families.

I wrote this in hopes that I can start posting here about different homeschool things we do in the future. I wanted to provide some context, I guess! We'll see if I follow through with that, I have been so busy it is really hard to find the time/motivation to blog. But I do think that doing Project 365 has helped with that, I do have it on my mind to blog more often. (But no guilt for not doing it... I'm at peace with my lack of regular blogging, finally!)