The one topic I haven’t talked about is our Wednesday – Unit Studies day. One of my selling points for homeschooling was that we could learn about whatever he wanted to learn about.
The first week he wanted to learn about….are you ready for this…video games. Sigh. So we checked out some books from the library about video games. We read about the history of video games, which consoles came in what order, we learned about the positive and negatives of playing video games and then he was to write in his notebook about what he learned. And he drew a blank. He had no idea what to write. I kept trying to give him hints and help him, but it was a struggle all day.
So the next week I decided we would learn about cars all month long. We read books, we looked at different models online, we read more books, I tried to get him to make a poster by cutting pictures of cars out of a car magazine (he cut out pictures of 20 steering wheels…why?), we watched a video about how cars are made, we made reservations at the Toyota manufacturing plant in San Antonio (which got canceled but rescheduled for Wednesday), a neighbor showed him the different parts of the engine and how a car works…theoretically this sounds like a lot of fun things to learn about. But each Wednesday is still a struggle.
I think it’s because I need things more structured. I don’t want to abandon our unit studies, but what we’ve been doing has not been working for me. Next week we are going to start doing a lap book about “Little House in the Big Woods” and it is a little more structured, so we’ll see if we enjoy that better.
There are other things about homeschooling that I don’t love. In general I don’t feel my house gets as clean. I don’t think I pay enough attention to Christian. He watches way too much PBS. I have a harder time making freezer meals or other things on my to-do list. I certainly don’t have as much “me” time. Going out to lunch with friends or visiting teaching is more difficult because I have an 8yo with me.
But despite the things I complain about, I am still enjoying spending the one-on-one time with Aaron. He loves learning which makes teaching him fun. But mostly I just like getting to spend the time with him.
Enough about homeschooling. Back to posts about birthdays and fun things we do as a family!
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