One More Hilarious Reason I'm glad I Homeschool

It was a comedy of errors really.

Not sure I'd have even noticed if I hadn't followed up with the swimming desk.

I wanted to verify whether my kids had passed their most recent level of swimming and collect their badges.

The record holder scanned the list with me...

Story Teller... check
Mountain Goat..... check
Negotiator..... check
Artist.... check
Planner.... check

Wait. What's this?
Artist has no show listed beside his name.
Artist, but none of his other siblings.

That's strange. What do you suppose we've been doing with Artist, while his siblings attend swimming lessons? Duct taping him to the bumper of the van in the parking lot? No swimming lessons for you, Artist.

I was directed to ask the supervisor about it. I'm glad she found it strange also, since she has taught my son previously, recognizes that I bring ALL of my kids to class, and yet, there is a paperwork discrepancy.

I chuckle and tell her I suspect it is simply an admin error.
She decided to ask Artist's teacher about it, since she might be able to explain why he had also been missing the report card.

This is the funniest part.

Supervisor: So do you have "The Artist" in your class today?
Teacher: No, He's not here.
Supervisor: (Pointing at Artist) What about that child? What is his name?
Teacher: Oh, that's Tony. (Tony is not my son's name)
Supervisor: I see. How often does Artist attend class?
Teacher: He's been a no show for quite a while.

There is further discussion about the Artist's true identity.
Ah, the light bulb begins to go on....

Turns out Artist shows up for class, his participation has been credited to 'Tony the No Show' and Tony was issued his report card. Shockingly, Tony failed to show up to collect it.
<chuckle>

Later I told the Artist what had happened, telling him that his name was actually Tony.
He was initially unimpressed, but then decided to make the best of it.
He's still in a superhero phase.

He's decided "Tony" is his secret identity.
He also passed.

He's also convinced that all he has to do is stop showing up for class in order to get a report card and pass his class.

Reason 3,261 that I'm glad I homeschool: It's a lot harder to lose track of who your students are.

Reorganizing our Schoolroom (Again)

You'll remember I posted before about our 2014/2015 School Room Tour, because we'd made, what I considered at the time, to be some pretty nifty changes to our school room.

You're welcome to check the link above to see the original post, but the pics above will give you an idea where I went with organizing the multitude of things needed for our school space.

Well, we've had a few months to test drive the new system and I was pretty happy with it. Functionally, I mean. I was so much more organized than what I'd been working with.
As time went on though, I could see that we needed to tweak it further.

We had some doors in the cubby units, that were brightly coloured, and I thought eye catching.
Turns out it's distracting for kids with attention problems.

So when we had the opportunity to replace our TV unit with a similar one in black, we scooped all the black doors from the front school room, and decided to match the doors to the already white units.
Very white, very boring. Very functional for the distracted monkeys.

The doors were added to more of the units, which allowed us to not see all the books. I think it contributes to a more stream lined look. The white very much brightens the room, which in med-January was a very welcome change.

We did also decide that we had too many paper types, note books, and even colouring books to store them in a way that helped us know in the first place that I already had them.
This resulted in me making more copies than necessary, or spending too much money on buying doubles of things. Big money saver, actually.

So we did a little reorganization, and added some more drawers to the units, rather than just doors.
We have partially re-labelled, but have more of that job left.

The neatest hack in this room, in my opinion, by far, were the tiny shelves that my dear husband added to the insides of the cubes. They hold the multitude of paper types, and small things, and do a great job of allowing us to see at a glance when we happen to be out of any given thing.

I am finding that I am breathing a sigh of relief. Things are easier to find, and less over whelming visually.

 Nony of A Slob Comes Clean, is a favourite blogger of mine when it comes to de-cluttering. She's great at talking about it all, and hilarious to boot. She talks on many occasions about the container method. How you can only have what fits in the container. These units we've put in the school room really work well with that concept, and I have to make what I have fit, or get rid of it, to keep the stuff behind the doors, which makes the whole room look better. Keeps me honest about my pack rat ways. Keeps me motivated, because I really like it when it's tidy, even if tidy seems a little out of reach with five children, who are onsite most of the time.

We did keep the coloured cubbies in one of the units, because those were the kids' personal 'locker' type storage space. They had become accustomed to the colours they each had, so they stay.
They may grow out of them soon, they may not. In the mean time, I have my splash of colour.

One last thing that we did was repaint and shellac the chairs in a darker colour. They used to be a honey colour and drove me a little crazy. This works better in the room, and is a little more forgiving than the light colour.

I would definitely say that the colour change in this room makes all the difference in the world.

Now to dig out the label maker and move on to making sure *everyone else* can find all the stuff and things.

Not Back to School

I had a 'breath caught in my throat ' moment this morning.

Disturbing, and healing all at the same time.

All because we started back to school this week.

You see, I ended up with a very busy couple of weeks, between preparing to, and speaking for my weight loss support group last Friday, and preparing to and leading our local home school support group meeting on the first day back to school.

Makes for one busy girl.
Lots to keep my mind occupied, and if I am completely honest, a little overwhelmed with the busy.
Fortunately it's a 'when it rains it pours' proposition, and the rain doesn't last for extended periods.
So we have a quiet period.

My mind has  moment to process.

That's when it happened.

It's not that it hasn't happened before, but not quite this way.

I realized that we still have one missing.
One that DIDN'T start school this year.
One for whom the day to day responsibility for parenting is not mine.
One that I never got to bring home.

The quiet afford me the moment to think of what grade he would be entering.
That's when it hit me.
I didn't know off the top of my head.
The shock hit me that I actually had to think about it this year.
Devestated, because I never thought the day would come. For a second scared that I would forget. That I could ever forget.
Healing, because it wasn't the main preoccupation.

To all the moms not sending one back to school, or stating them back to a school year for the same reason,  or simply fresh in your missing your little one, my heart goes out to you.

Please take some time to be kind to yourself if you are currently struggling.

So It Begins!!! Back to School We Go.

Today was our first day back after a break from hitting the books! 

We spent a few weeks gearing up for the new year, and taking a well needed, well deserved break, and have gone back to it.

As you can see my boys are getting a little too old to be thrilled about our traditional back to school photos. Note cheese-y plastered on fake smiles.

They even went so far as to work diligently to avoid looking at the camera.

We have enjoyed our first day well enough, as unorthodox as it was for a first day back.

We had a few early risers who hit the books very early, and then we chose to get ready and change the scenery before too much of the day disappeared on us.

We took  advantage of the short lines and ran some early morning errands. It afforded us the opportunity to practice our every day courtesies; waiting patiently in lines for our turn, keeping ourselves occupied in a non-obnoxious way, making pleasant conversation with people.

I think it worked out well for us, because it gave us a break, before returning back home to finish off the book work.

Fortunately, we have had lots of cooperation today, because we have also chosen to  reinforce a forgotten policy,  whereby tech time must be earned, and only after the days' responsibilities are taken care of, rather than the kids making the assumption that they are 'allowed' to have tech time 'just because'.

I give it three days before the novelty wears off and we have to work to keep this going.

But for today, I'm proud of the work they chose to put in on their first day back to it.

Summer Reading Motivation!

For some of us, we have children who make us proud in the reading department. We can't tear them away from books of all sorts and descriptions.

What about those of us whose children need extra motivation?

What if you could set a goal of a certain number of books, or chapters, for your child to read, and have a visual way to keep track?

Well, I have an idea for you.

It's simple, and appeals to many ages. It can also be adapted to many other uses. 

First go online and Google "free printable 100 chart." You will be presented with a ton of options. Find one that speaks to you. 

We found the one pictured below here. 

If you need something with less squares on it, by all means don't limit yourself to a hundreds chart. Any large grid graph paper can be adapted to your purposes and then photocopied.

So how do we implement it?

In our case, we are choosing to let the kids read a book/chapter, according to their reading level or tolerance, and fill in the boxes on the chart. When the chart is full, they get ten dollars. The amounts are relative and can be adapted to the goal you set for your child. 

To make the chart effective,  make sure the chart  gets posted where it'll be motivating to the child, and they will see it often. 

If you have multiple children, you may find they urge each other on if they charts are all together, and they can have a healthy competition going on.

If your children work better with a co-operative approach, then by all means approach it from that stand point. You may find that setting a date goal for all  to have the chart filled, will do nicely. Then the group works together to finish as a group, rather than there being a competition over who can fill the chart first.

There are all sorts of ways to fill the boxes: stickers, bingo dabbers, markers, stamps, crayons and pencil crayons are all great things for the kids to use. If you prefer, the parent's initials are also an option.

Enjoy, and Happy Reading!

Jen