Accidental Homeschooling: Weeks 12 and 13
By: Sarah Cords
Tags: Parenting, Homeschooling, Education, Family, Life

Accidental Homeschooling: Weeks 12 and 13

Turns out I still love a good workbook

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

We had a quiet Thanksgiving at home, and it was awesome. I missed seeing our extended family, and so did the kids, but we talked to both of the grandmothers on the phone, and you know what? I thought it was nicer than seeing them in person. Often, when we and everybody else are at our respective homes, I find all our time is taken up serving lunch and cleaning up after lunch, and then we repeat the show at dinnertime. I actually didn’t miss that routine. Doing dishes for more than 15 people at time blows.

So we had a lovely three-day week, and then, for Week 13, it was right back at it Monday morning.

We did not have a good Monday.

But: I’m learning to let it go. I have good and bad days in every other aspect of my life, why would homeschooling be any different? So I’m learning to accept that some days are stinkers, and there is nothing to do on stinker days but to try and get through them as best you can.

And then, after my stinker day, the cavalry arrived: New workbooks!

That’s right, my friends, I gave in and bought several new workbooks from the awesome Rainbow Resource Center online store. This was the week I decided to break several of them out.

Let me just say, I had forgotten how much I love a good workbook. I’ve always been both task-oriented and super lazy, so worksheets and workbooks make me very happy. They offer very specific tasks (and ones I used to be very good at, like filling in sentences and drawing lines to matching items and plugging numbers into multiplication times tables) and clarity about when you’re done with work: when the worksheet is done, you’re done. SUPER.

So we started a new math workbook with the first grader, and it turns out (at least it has so far; I know it’s still early days) that he also enjoys a good workbook. I’ve set him free to do however many worksheets he wants during math time, and, God love him, he sometimes did more than I suggested. And seemed content to be doing so. Ah, first grade math, addition and subtraction we can all still mostly understand, happy days.

I also gave my elder son a new book about all the states in America (complete with fun facts), and tried to set him free on his “states project.” We’ve been ordering free tourism information from multiple states, and also getting books out of the library, and the idea is that he’ll make a binder with information about all fifty states as his year-long Social Studies project.

Let’s just say that little idea is not working out as well as the math workbook. But, you have to try.

We also got a new Language Arts workbook for the first grader, because, even though I believe most reading and writing skills develop naturally as you read (which is one of the reasons you should read a lot), I thought, why not? It’s a workbook! It’ll give us a structure! It’ll give us practice worksheets that we can practice with and then be done! So I asked the fourth-grader to look at the book with us. And this is what he said:

“I already know our language — I’m using it to speak to you RIGHT NOW!”

We ended that debate when I asked him what a noun was (the first lesson in the workbook) and he got it wrong. To my great surprise, after that, he actually sat down and went through the lesson with us quite peacefully.

And that’s the moment I’m going to focus on when I think back on this week, not Stinker Monday.