In my previous post, I wrote about doing SOMETHING for homeschool instead of nothing, which is where we've been firmly planted for the last several months. I promised a few more thoughts on making "good enough" work for our family, and trying not to get so overscheduled and overplanned that I wind up doing nothing.
So, 1. Golf ball principle - plan the biggies, don't worry about the stuff that always seems to get done anyway. 2. Record success and completion, but don't overplan ahead of time.
And now I give you principles 3 and 4:
3. Visual reminders/accountability, particularly a Job Chart - I know, I warned you, ROCKET SCIENCE. Mikayla was given a magnetic/dry erase responsibility chart for her birthday, and we finally rolled it out. We picked ten things that should happen every day, or most days, for the chart. They are all about marking off their jobs as they finish, and may I say, for a girl who has never made her bed before in her life, Mikayla's bed looks PRISTINE today. I wonder how else I underestimate her? Also, both kids actually brushed their teeth after breakfast. To my shame, this is noteworthy. Thanks for the applause.
On our Job Chart I included lines for "Bible/catechism" and "School" and "Read-Aloud". Those are more for me than the kids, because I so desperately need the visual reminder to do those things. We do them in fits and starts and eventually burn out from undertaking too much at once. So even for tasks that don't happen every single day, I can now see where we marked them off and how many more times we should shoot for in a week. A stack of beautiful lesson plans in a schoolroom drawer have not, so far, helped me be very successful in "doing school" very often. Out of sight, out of mind. (The Read-Aloud category is for us to do a longer read-aloud book or series in addition to the regular short-book reading we do all the time.)
4. Semper Gumby. I got this phrase from my laid-back mother in law, meaning "always flexible!" I mentioned my brain paralysis that I get when I feel overscheduled and overwhelmed, even if I simply write down all the things I probably will be doing that day anyway. Flexibility is key for me, which on one hand means not boxing myself in with too strict a plan. And on the other hand, it means noticing how things are going and using that feedback to keep boosting our success.
Example of Semper Gumby in action: in our pow wow yesterday, Joel and I agreed that the kids should do Bible time/catechism every day. Ok, big golf ball item into the jar. I thought we would work on one memory verse until we've got it mastered, and put it on our chalkboard, write it in memory verse notebooks, and review it out loud, and move onto a new verse when it seems right. None of this "a verse a week" business. And maybe we'd put our new verse up on the chalkboard on a Monday (or whatever random Day 1 it might be for a verse) and learn it, or part of it; write it into notebooks on Tuesday; copy it onto different paper on Wednesday for practice; and simply review it Thursday and Friday. If it takes more than a day or two to learn a whole verse, then we take longer. No biggie. Also, catechism would involve learning a new question and reviewing old ones, maybe a question every few days or so. And then we'd do some Bible reading every day as well.
I learned very quickly yesterday that we are not going to be doing all of the above every day. News flash: my kids do not have the attention span! I got a Bible verse onto the chalkboard and started to teach it with lots of movement to keep little man interested. "God is our refuge" - lots of pretending that one person was the storm ("crash! boom!" stomp stomp stomp) and I would be the refuge, sheltering the other child from the storm. Etc etc. Totally on the fly, we had fun with it. But we barely made it through the whole one-sentence verse before people were losing interest. No way we were going to also do catechism and a Bible story in the same sitting. Lesson for me: teach a verse one day, and then on a day when it's just verse review, maybe undertake to do a new catechism question. And alternate structure with non-structure. Twenty minutes of Bible time probably earns a good 20-30 minutes of free play, after which they might be ready to come back for some Phonics Museum.
Did I mention I realize this isn't rocket science? Veteran parents are reading this like, "DUH. You are trained in psychology?" But it's a change from my previous vision of modeling our preschool after what the "real" preschools do out there in the world. Or what I imagine that they do. And just putting this out there: I will probably never create a sensory bin, unless some toys accidentally fall into a bag of rice. My kids get loads of sensory experience from playing outside with rocks, grass, dirt, and water. They play with their food. They blow bubbles. To borrow one of my favorite PoMo phrases, they "do life". (You're up, Joel.*) Which, incidentally, also gets them a fair amount of "school" experience - reading words from labels, boxes, and signs (not to mention books), and doing numbers, measures, and sizes from recipes, board games, and such. They have interests that guide our library book choices and Google searches.
Does any of this sound familiar to you? What have you learned about being a good enough parent or caregiver? Have you had to adapt your "ideal" vision to account for personalities and the realities of life? It can be tough to give up on the perfect, but the honesty of saying, "That doesn't work for me!" is SO liberating, and freed me up to find ways to be more successful. My homeschool may not look like your homeschool, EVER, and that's ok! After all, something is better than nothing!
And my four year old just marched sternly into the living room, declaring, "We have to Read Aloud." Score one for the Job Chart!
*Joel and I play this game where we try to speak completely in postmodern catch phrases. It's so authentic and genuine and fosters such a sense of community between us as we jump on the trampoline of experience together.
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