Count on your toes then! It doesn’t matter to me!

Sam got tired of counting and adding…  so I grabbed her feet and told her to use her toes…

she started cracking up…  couldn’t add for all the giggling…

Last Nights “SuperNanny” episodes…

I can’t keep it in… I just can’t…

It is only on a rare occasion that I even get to see the show, usually when I’m in need of a new trick to use on my kids, but since last night was full of reruns and football we ended up watching “Wife Swap” (ugh) and the back to back “Supernanny” episodes. I wasn’t going to post about it, but when I was reviewing the keywords used to find my other blog I stumbled upon some sites that were talking negatively about homeschooling rather than on the parents.

To start off the evening, Wife Swap had a homeschooling mother that appeared to never let her kids out.  I don’t know if it’s true, I don’t know her or the family.  I just didn’t see the kids involved in anything outside of home.  They seemed perfectly fine and respectful children, not to mention well educated, but if my mother had seen that she’d have been on the phone with me all night.  (Just for the record, I didn’t care for the other mom much either…  talk about two extremes).

Then there was the second Supernanny episode that involved two teenage homeschooled girls left to care for their three brothers all day.  I have seen a few blogs (that I won’t link to) that seemed to focus their complaints on the homeschooling not on the obvious neglect and abuse.  Who cares if they are homeschooled?  Why are they being asked to act like parents?  What gives the mom the right to just “give up” when she gets home and leave it all up to her kids?

So, I felt the need, for any of my family that might be reading, to let everyone know…

I’m not trying to hide my kids from the world.

I AM going to let them out and let them have friends…  it’s freezing outside right now so forgive me if we’ve skipped a few park play dates…it’s WINTER.

I am NOT doing this so that Sammy can take care of the smaller kids while I do something else.

and if EVER, I felt this decision was turning into a poor decision… I would reevaluate it, immediately.

The new game plan is working…. this week..

Forgive me some more… but I still haven’t found my info on the steps to homeschooling…  it IS in the room that I plan on re-discovering today.

As I mentioned before, Sam has already started school again.  I was going to let this week end first, but NOOOO she just had to get going.  Good thing I had a new game plan, and finished putting it together over the weekend.

I was running into a bit of a problem.  She’s done almost all of the Kindergarten stuff.  I realized that a lot of her work was first grade level. So, I went to Learning Page and downloaded the first grade “Ocean’s Unit”.  (Print, Print, Print)  Then I took all her workbooks (two math books and two reading/spelling books) and tore the pages out.  I figured, in my head, that we had done 1/2 the year, and since public school is 180 days, that means we have 90 days left.  So I split the workbooks sheets into 90 days.  It was tricky, but I did the best I could.  We ended up with 33 days worth of work, yep thats it.  So we’ll do them twice a week.  The oceans study is only 10 lessons long… so we’ll do that twice a week through January.  And if I throw in one of the five senses each week then we have five days of school a week, and I’m “planned” through the end of January.   The last Friday we’ll pull all our sheets together and make a few lapbooks out of our work.  Phew… then what…

I was flipping through my “What every….should know” book and found a few topics that we “know” but could use a good lesson in, like magnets… that could be fun…  or making a weather vane…  so I might could fill up some of February.  Then what?

What are you supposed to do when you run out of stuff to do?  I know I can fill it up with reading and trips and such.

But do you just fill it with misc. stuff?  Do you move on to the next grade?   Do you find a cool long term project to do? Start Summer break early?

I know it won’t always be like this.  Something will come along to slow her down.   Maybe I’m missing something….

hmmmmm….