A Day in the Life of a WAH-Home Schooling Family

It seems there’s a new online magazine for homeschoolers, “Heart of the Matter“, and they’re running a meme asking home schoolers to share a day in the life of their families.

I’m only homeschooling one five year old right now, and because he’s only five we take a pretty relaxed view of what goes on in a day. No day is typical for us, but this is what today was like….

Morning:

Woke up late after staying up a little too late last night. Had breakfast, made a HUGE pot of coffee, and started David on his Mathematical Reasoning book, while his dad and I got ready for a conference call. David worked while we explained to a client why we didn’t spend our Christmas holiday working on their stuff. The call lasted about an hour and a half, after which I checked on David’s progress and saw he’d finished a quarter of the book and covered sections on bar graphs, venn diagrams, and probability along with oodles of review pages.

Feeling guilty for leaving him to work on math for so long by himself, I teach him how to make paper chain people. He tries a few, and once he gets a chain he thinks he likes, he starts turning all the people in the chain into his favorite superheroes. So far he’s got Batman, Robin, and … Santa Claus. Ok, maybe not all superheroes.

Lunch time!

I go downstairs to make lunch. David follows me down and plays with his Crazy Fort in the living room while I cook up some food. I try to do dishes afterward to find out there’s no hot water. Sending Dad down to check it didn’t increase the water temperature at all, so I boiled water for the dishes while he called the repair man and argued that we really need hot water before next week.

After lunch, David practiced his piano. His last lesson was before Christmas so he’s been practicing the same songs for a long time. I think we’re both getting a little tired of them, though they’re sounding really good at this point.

I’ve still got piles of work to do, so David sits down and reads a few of the books we borrowed from the library. He reads out loud, and as long as I can follow with half an ear, I can help him with words he is having problems with from the context.

When he’s tired of reading, he goes back to his paper chain people and makes Superman before I pull him away to go to his piano lesson.

Evening

The piano lesson goes splendidly, and he’s got six new songs to practice for next week. At least the songs are getting a little more interesting now that he’s playing with both hands.

After his lesson, I start making supper while he sorts the recycling into the blue boxes. When he’s done with the blue boxes, he plays his RushHour game for a half an hour while I cook. After supper I take out the garbage and blue boxes and boil more water for dishes.

Once clean-up is done, we head back up to my office where he works on some more chain people while I work and we both listen to Alice in Wonderland. We’re listening to the version from kiddierecords.com this week. Last week we listened to a podcast version from Curiosoft. They are very, very different to listen to. Perhaps we’ll grab a third version from Audible next week.

Since the repair man isn’t coming to fix the hot water heater till tomorrow afternoon, there’s no bathtime tonight, so after brushing his teeth, David writes a line in his daily journal, gets is jammies on, and climbs in bed where I read him a few chapters from his latest book.

It’s another late bedtime, thereby dispelling any hopes I might have had of getting an early start tomorrow.

Tags: homeschool, homeschooling, homeschooler

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This entry was posted on Friday, January 11th, 2008 at 12:11 am and is filed under Homeschooling, Life & Everything Else. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.