Winter Break

What is winter break for?  In this house it's not for a break.  I decided to take some time out of our leisurely boring schedule of lazily doing nothing of any consequence to work on some stuff with the kids.

Creeper has really been struggling with school.  He does really well with the math, but the reading and writing is a little more trying for him.  Instead of having a carefree winter break, we've been working on some school stuff.

Of course, this really makes me think about the whole situation with school.  If I'm having the kids do all of this work at home, would it be possible to just homeschool them again?  Would this be the best option?  It's something that's been really tugging at the back of my mind.

Since it's winter break, I'm not worrying about that too much right now.  My main goal is to get Creeper back on track, which seems like a productive use of this break from school.  I'm glad he's able to get some work done, even though winter break is half over.  It's good to feel like we're accomplishing something for all this time off.

Then there's Bear.  We've been doing some work together outside of the computer.  I've got to admit, Bear has been trying my patience on the peaceful parenting thing.  I'm trying to get away from using tactics like time out, but it's not easy when Bear is so worked up over the past week.  It's been pretty crazy around here.  It makes it hard for Bear to concentrate and focus.

Still, Bear has managed to get some good work in.  We've started working with the workbooks Bear got for Christmas.  This has been trying with the lack of focus and the suddenly hyper behavior.  We've had to work hard to keep focus and stay on task.  Overall, I'd say we're making some pretty good progress.

Today we worked with some tracing lines, drawing lines along a path, and (as you can see here) tracing letters.  Bear seems really eager to learn these skills.  If Bear could keep a little more chill and focused, I think we'd be making some pretty good progress, but that wouldn't be Bear, now would it.  Instead we've been plugging away, trying to work on focus and attention span along with getting the work done.  I think that's maybe the hardest part of this whole thing, the attention span aspect of it all.

This whole thing has me considering the homeschooling thing with Bear too.  So far we've been doing pretty well.  Most of what we've been doing has been on the computer with Time 4 Learning.  I'm also considering Starfall, which Bear loves the free version of, and it can be played on all of our devices.  Now we're adding in more workbooks.  The whole thing is coming together pretty well.

All of this has my mind set to homeschooling.  There are a lot of reasons for this, many of which I don't feel belong in this blog, but the root of it all is that it doesn't seem to be working out for my family.  The long and the short of it is wondering if perhaps this is where our lives are taking us again.  It's a lot to consider, and definitely not a path I'm ready to jump onto now.  For now I'll be happy with doing our vacation work and calling it a day.