Our first week of school went pretty well! My biggest fears of homeschooling were 1) that the babies would get in the way and make it hard for the big boys to concentrate and 2) that I would have to fight with the boys to get them to do it. Happily, only one of those fears really happened. Of course the babies were distracting despite my best efforts to make it not so. I planned out all kinds of activities that Heidi could do and built our schedule with tons of breaks so that I could attend to their needs. But they are still just little people who didn't necessarily always want to follows mom's schedule. Heidi seemed to want to do only what Asher and Leif were doing, so by the end of the week I had her better taken care of by letting her feel like she was "doing school". We had a few tear-filled breakdowns when she wanted a turn for me to sit with her one-on-one and teacher her something, which I really should have anticipated. So, now I'm trying to make time to do that for a few minutes every now and then. She also had a strong desire to use the dry-erase markers and boards. I did let her do it, but I know its only a matter of time before she draws on something she's not supposed to. Trevor has been very good in general, we just need to work on getting him a better nap schedule. I've tried to make the bulk of Asher and Leif's learning happen during Heidi's long afternoon nap. If Trevor happens to take a nap at the same time, things are really simple and go so smoothly. My other fear that the boys would not want to do school really hasn't been much of a problem. There have been times when one was really distracted by what I was doing with the other or by a younger sibling and I've had to remind them to get back on track multiple times, but they really seem to like school. The tasks that they have to do on their own (math workbooks, writing, coloring sheets) they get really engrossed in and the parts that we do together (me reading literature, history, or science books to them and talking about it) they adore. As you can see we have a couch in our school room and its really fun to snuggle up and read together. Here are some photos of our school room the morning before school started (it doesn't always stay so clean!)
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