Saturday, September 15, 2012

SECOND WEEK OF SCHOOL

Our second week of school this year and so far so good.    We have, again, been plagued by numerous interruptions to my tidy little schedule.  That's life I guess.  And the kids have been doing a fabulous job making it work.   This year the boys are in grades 9, 5, 3, and PreK.  The girls are college freshman and grades 8 and 2 plus a 9 mo old.

This is the first year I've had recess before lunch.  Really.  I always had lunch then recess because that's the way I grew up with it in public school.  But I realized that I was always butting up against lunch trying to help someone and either delaying lunch or responding to too many questions about what to eat (now we but up against recess for that one child and that's ok).  I also realized that my desire to have a rest time immediately after recess was pretty foolish.  "Hey kids....go run around for awhile then come back in and lay quietly on your beds reading and if you are young maybe you'll fall asleep."  Sheesh - what was I thinking?    So....now we have recess - lunch - rest time.

My 8th grader loves to read.  This is where Terese spent her "recess".  I found her up in a tree reading Longfellow's Evangeline (part of her history assignment).  She said she couldn't get up there carrying a book so she put in it in her purse to climb with.   Normally I like the kids to get some more exercise but sometimes on a beautiful day it's nice to just climb a tree and read.  Besides, 8th graders don't get recess normally - do they?
 
Elizabeth, Logan, Wyatt, and Henry couldn't wait to get back out to the pile of dirt they had dug tunnels through for their Lego vehicles.  (My older kids will say we've gotten old - we used to NEVER allow Legos outside -too many tears when a piece was lost.)
 
 
Nathan spent his recess moving sprinklers around watering the lawn.  His choice.  He takes pride in a nice green lawn!   The house we live in was foreclosed for over a year.  You can only imagine the state of the lawn.  It's looking a lot better!
 
 
One thing I've done differently this year is move our start time until 8:00.   I felt like I was always prodding kids to get ready, eat, fix their hair, etc.  Now they are encouraging each other to get ready early so they can play ping pong on the school tables (we host science classes here and just decided to leave the tables up as their desks) or they are allowed to watch Wild Kratts.  Elizabeth should be getting 4 hours of eye patch time in daily and watching TV is one thing she can see well enough do.  But, kids can only watch if they are ready for school!
 
 
yeah - nice poster falling off the wall!  We are still working on the details of our school room.  See the two white boards underneath the map of the world?  Nathan has been making plans to make a white board stand that is movable and 2 sided.  I miss my white board wall at our old house - but so far this is working.  And, not sure if you can tell or not but that bright green "paddle" Wyatt is holding is his homemade ping pong paddle made out of Legos.  It works, it hasn't fallen apart.  We haven't found the second "real" paddle.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

8th grade recess... YES. Well, depends on your school but 8th grade is the end. However, I think everyone still could use recess.