Please share!
I’ve written before about some health issues I’ve been dealing with this year. Well, add another to the list. While we were in Miami I began having abdominal pain and nausea. As soon as we returned home, I saw my Dr. A few days later, an u/s revealed a large mass in my pelvis, presumably on my left ovary. A visit to a gyn oncologist later, and I am scheduled to have that removed along with a total abdominal hysterectomy. I’ll be admitted to the hospital for sugery this Thursday.
Which brings me to our homeschool. Between the health issues, and a stop along the way for studies on the Olympics, the Everglades, and now the Election, we have fallen way behind with My Father’s World Exploring Countries and Cultures. Weeks and weeks behind. Which makes me crazy! I love ECC, I love having a schedule to follow, if nothing happens to interfere with the following of the schedule. Obviously, that’s not been the case for us. And now having surgery and the resulting recovery period will make it even more difficult to keep up.
So, some adjustments need to be made. Isn’t that the beauty of homeschooling? When our plans backfire for whatever reason, we are able to readjust to a schedule or curriculum that will work best for us. So I’m simplifying things greatly for the rest of the year. I need things to be easy, easy for me, easy for Ben to work independently more, and easy for my Mom who will be helping a lot.
Change #1 obviously is that we’ll be shelving ECC for now. My first love has always been unit studies, so we’ll be going back to using those. Once we finish Amanda Bennett’s Elections Unit, we’ll move on to literature-based units from Homeschool Share and Five in a Row, volume 4.
Change #2 is that we’ve added Time4Learning to our day. If you are not familiar with Time4Learning, you’ll want to check out their website. It is a web-based curriculum for Pre-K to 8th grade. We’ll be using it mostly for Math and Language Arts, but they also have Science and Social Studies. We started using it last week and Ben absolutely loves it! There are many benefits to it. I can set timers for each subject, they have lesson plans and printable worksheets for added practice, it keeps a record of what Ben has completed and his quiz scores, and the most fun part for Ben is the Playground. The Playground has tons of fun games to play. You can even set up a schedule of schoolwork followed by Playground time. Ben’s scheduled is set so that he does 30 minutes of math lessons, then 15 minutes of Playground time, 30 minutes of Language Arts, followed by 15 minutes of Playground time. It’s a great incentive to complete the schoolwork, knowing he’ll have some play time as a reward.
We’ll continue our Singapore math as well, a couple of times a week. We’ll also continue our animal studies and notebooking with our friends once a week, along with copywork using our Manners book. And certainly our unit studies will cover science and social studies well. But for now, this will be it. I think it’s plenty for the next couple of months, and will make it easy for Nana or Dad to step in to help out.
So we’ll finish up Elections, and move on to Pirates (per Ben’s request). I’m hoping to talk him into a Thanksgiving unit first, but if not, oh well. I think some time of child-directed learning may be just what the Dr. orders.
Please share!
