First Day of School

There is nothing like the first day of school--even if you don't leave the house! I had to laugh...all four kids were up, dressed, washed, brushed, beds made, etc. before 8:30 in the morning. They woke me up, all excited to start school. I showered and dressed, but Rachel already had the coffee brewed. We traipsed outside to take "school photos" which include a group shot by the baby pine Grandma and Poppy gave us when we moved in--we promised to take photos of the kids next to it every year to see how they (and the tree) have grown. Then it was back inside to start our school day.

Rachel works on her own, and Julia does pretty well by herself, but of course Ben needs constant attention. Not to be outdone, Emma insisted that she was also in Kindergarten, and that she needed lessons to do. So I gave her various tasks that were similar to what Ben was doing--though of course Ben had to point out that only he is old enough for Kindergarten and he is doing real work while her work is just fake. Howling ensued...pause while I attended to that! When Ben was done with his work, which included phonics, letters, numbers, artwork, and writing, he was upset because I hadn't assigned more work! I had to explain the concept of burnout and not wanting to do too much on one day, and that since he's 5, he doesn't require hours of school a day. All he could see was that Rachel and Julia get to do a lot more work than he does......

The I turned to helping Julia. She had finished her rather arduous math assignment, which was only review but still had a lot of problems (and I only assigned 2/3 of them!). I helped her where needed on Language Arts, Health, History and reading. We discussed some of the things she had to read and I checked assignments. Rachel had to redo some math because she didn't show her work. And her History assignment took a long time. Plus she wrote answers out from a workbook that I'd said she could write in (there are certain really useful texts that I don't want written in so that I can reuse them with other kids--other workbooks are cheap/tailored to that specific child, and are consumable--she confused the two) that made her take a long time on another assignment. So she worked the longest for sure.

My biggest problem, bar none, was trying to juggle everyone's need for attention--sometimes I was doing work with Ben while someone else had a question, and of course there was Emma, interrupting everyone all the time--and the general noise level. It can be really frustrating when trying to concentrate on math, but mom is talking to someone else about phonics. And of course those frustrations were voiced. Loudly at times. Then there's the distraction of someone else's lesson being more interesting than yours--Ben was making an art project with coloring, glue sticks and scissors that Julia really wanted to watch rather than do math problems. And Rachel couldn't help but listen while we read "Snow White" for Julia's Language Arts lesson (she has a very neat book called "Under the Fairy Tale Tree" for one aspect of Language Arts...)

I'm hoping that once the novelty of school wears off, everyone will be back to the status quo. Emma will play or look at books, Julia will want to do her own thing so I can concentrate on Ben, and then when he's done he and Emma can have their TV time so I can focus on Julia's needs, and Rachel will decide that she'd rather have her privacy in her room--and then I can help her after Julia. With any luck, we won't be doing school ALL day and can have some fun in the afternoons! But I can tell you that homeschooling was much simpler with only one, or even only two. Luckily by the time Emma is really old enough for school, everyone will have matured that much more.....and that there won't be any more kids!

Jen