Ready For School!

After a couple weeks of lesson planning, we are pretty much ready to go! I have one more subject to order once payday hits and some things to print off, other than that we are set.

This year I will be full time schooling my four daughters, and I will be starting preschool with my son. He will be going to a therapy school two days a week and then two days a week we will be working on preschool stuff at home. He is so excited, he can hardly stand it!

Summer Update

We are currently enjoying several weeks of summer before school starts again! 

As you can see by the above picture, we have been enjoying our summer break! We have had a couple small vacations as well as day trips with friends.

If you remember from my last post from July, we started year round schooling. So we are currently in our last break, our summer break, before the new school year starts in September. We plan on doing year round schooling again this school year. The kids really enjoyed it and begged for us to continue doing it!

I will be posting more regularily once school starts up again, till then, you will be seeing a post on homeschool curriculum in the near future and I will tell you what we are planning this year. Which is a lot more eclectic than past years!

New Chore System- Zone Responsibillity

Hi there! I hope that everyone's summer is going great! We have been doing good here, just enjoying our time with family and friends as well as some small vacations and day trips. 

I wanted to talk about one thing that we started at the beginning of summer regarding our chores around the house. I am one to always look for a better/more effective or efficient way to do things. We have done a chore chart for the past ten years since my oldest was about two years old. However, in the past six months, I was thinking that it was about time for a change. Here are the reasons:

1. With having five kids, I was having a hard time training one on one how to properly do things. For instance: My older two girls were in charge of the dishwasher, taking turns every other day to load and unload. The problem would be when I went to work in the kitchen and found either dirty dishes in the cupboard or maybe things not put away properly, I would not know who I needed to re-train. 
2. I was constantly going to the chore chart to see who's day it was to do the garbage/clean bathroom etc. It was not an effective system for us.

After doing some thinking and reading about how other large families keep a handle on things, I decided we would start doing zones. So here is what we are doing:

• We split the house into five zones: Kitchen, kids' bathroom, living room, dining room and laundry room.
• We made a list of what needs to be done in each room and posted them on the wall. Such as for living room: Vacuum/empty garbage/dust/tidy etc...
• We assigned one child to each zone, yes, including the three year old!
• They switch rooms at the beginning of the month.

How is this working for us? We are loving it! The kids love that they have just one room to concentrate on. They are also enjoying the one on one training time with mom! How am I liking it? Well, now when I am working in a room and I see something that needs to be done, I can just ask whoever is in charge of that room to come take care of it. When there is training that needs to be done, I don't have to look and see who is in charge of that particular chore for the day, I ask whoever is in charge to come and we train. 

At the beginning of the month, when we change zones, I spend a couple days training the younger kids on what they need to know for the new room. After they have spent a couple days learning, I merely go verbally through the list of chores every day to make sure they have completed their tasks. Then just train as needed throughout the month.

As far as my three year old, he just becomes my buddy for whatever room he is "in charge of"! For instance, right now, he is in charge of the kitchen! So he is helping me put dishes away, load the dishwasher, clean, cook etc...last month he helped me in the dining room and the month before it was the living room.

Tonight I asked the girls if they would rather do zones or a chore list and they said in unison: "ZONES!"

Update at our school year!

It has been a few weeks since you have heard from me! We have been having a wonderful summer playing with our family and friends as well as some light schooling.

I thought I would update on our first year of Year Round Schooling: When I announced we were going to do it this past school year, I had many different responses! I had people who were completely and utterly against it. They warned that I, as a teacher, would be burnt out and that it wasn't fair to the kids to take their summer "away" from them. Then I had the people who just thought it was interesting and wanted me to report on how I thought it went. Then I had more who said that they have schooled this way for years and it was the only way to go!

So what did we think about it?

1) The kids all said they LOVED it!
2) There was no "winter burn out" that we usually experience around February.
3) We loved having the breaks every few weeks and planned our field trips accordingly.
4) About the summer thing: We really only worked about 3.5 weeks of the whole summer! We normally stop around May 20th or so. Instead, we worked till around June 15th, then about one more week after our vacation. So did I "take away" their summer? Nope!
5) Will we do it till the end of time? I don't know, but we loved it enough to do it again this coming school year.

Here is a blog entry that tells you how we figured out when to place our breaks, I will be doing it again this year:
It's Happening! We're Doing It!

If you follow my blog, let me know if you like year round homeschooling or even if you don't! I love to hear different opinions on how it has worked or not worked for you!

Have a great summer!