And then Harry's class stopped learning anything.
Seriously, they replaced literacy centers with eating watermelon and spitting the seeds on the playground and played with wet sponges during math time. We parent volunteers got to stop volunteering, but we had to be sure to send our kids to school with bubble gum for bubble blowing day. WTF??
Maybe if schools didn't assume that summer was going to rot our kids' brains and kept, um, learning, for the last 2 weeks of school, kids would not equate summer break with mind candy, huh?
Anyway, we heeded the flyer's advice, and H and J are elbow deep in workbooks, journals, and library reading lists. We have a lovely time after breakfast doing a few pages of Harry's kindergarten-to-first-grade bridge book and Jack's little "preschool scholar" books. Then Harry reads to us for a little while, and both kids write a journal page-- something fun they did or something they have learned-- Harry's has words and pictures, and Jack's is just pictures. So far the kids love it, but I absolutely do not have the patience or the technique necessary for for-real homeschooling.
Here's Harry in action:
Cooper FINALLY got to go to Little Gym for a baby class. It went terribly-- I carried his out of the building when he became a screamy ball of screams at 9:35. Naptime. 10 minutes before class ends. Scheduling FAIL. He also went up to all the other babies and smacked them in the head/bang/eyebrow area and yelled "Haaaaaa!" which is his Frankenstein way of saying hair. That went over huge with their parents, as you can imagine.
I have been obsessed with making Shutterfly photo books. I decided to start making the kids each one on their birthdays, but after I put Harry and Jack's together, I realized they need to have photo books starting from babyhood, so I have been pouring over 6 years of pictures on external hard drives trying to condense each year into about 20 pages. Tedious and fun!
Next week, I need to go to campus a lot-- one day to meet with my intern, one day to attend a super long workshop, and one day to speak at a women and leadership symposium. That's going to seriously cut into my pool time.
Look! It's Jack pushing mini-Jack!
You are so great to have the boys doing bridge stuff over summer break--I bought one of those bridge workbooks for Ethan as something "fun" to do on the plane when we travel this summer. LOL I might have to be a bit more proactive than that.
ReplyDeleteGreat idea to keep up the summer learning!! Maybe Charlie needs a new journal now that he can annotate his drawings.
ReplyDeleteWhen my kids were younger, I had them do the exact same thing over the summer....Math workbooks and journal. My youngest, now 14, was kind of snarky about "how summers were when they were younger" (complaining about the Math). She then said, "It probably helped, though!" That's about as close to satisfaction as I'm going to get from a teenager. Now that they are older, my requirement is one book a month...of their choosing. We download it to the Kindle, and I read the same book that they are reading so we can discuss it.
ReplyDeleteI'm the queen of Shutterfly books. let me know if you want me to send you a link, and I'll show you a fun one I did for my granddaughter.
Totally with you about the end of school and lack of academics in our district. As a parent, I, too, was like, WTF? It certainly was not like that back in the day.
ReplyDeleteLove your blog. :)
I bought the kids workbooks too and i fully intended to work with them a little each day during Sophie's naptime, but usually I'm so sick of having kids around I just make them go in the basement and leave me alone. Stellar parenting for sure.
ReplyDeleteI'm also on a photo book kick - I decided to get rid of all my conventional photo albums and just make photo books for each year instead. So I've made 2006-2010 so far, and then I thought I'd order those because they were having a special, and my total was over $600. So, they are made, but not ordered. I'm waiting for some kind of magical money fairy to come and help me pay for them.