I've been working more on my gardening blog and less on this one of lately. Not sure who reads any of it anyway, but here goes! While I have worked in my garden this year, I have thought a lot about patience. It takes about 60 days from the time the bean sprouts, until you get your first handful of green beans off the vine. It takes that much or longer for so many of my other crops. I get so impatient with my garden, but there is nothing I can do to hurry it along any faster than the plants can actually grow. I can fertilize them, make sure they are planted properly, weed them, squish the buggies that invade, etc. In the end, the fruit comes when it is ready. Which is usually about two or three weeks after I start saying, "Hurry up!!". If I pick the fruit early, it doesn't taste very good. And if I give up, the weeds or pests take over and I don't get much fruit. Sometimes even if I try my hardest, I still don't succeed.
Gardening has taught me to slow down and to savor what I have while I have it. After all, fresh tomato sandwiches only come for me as long as I can keep up my garden. But these lessons apply to my children as well. We have found ourselves way too busy and hurried this past school year. We took some classes on Tuesdays with our homeschooling group, had Theatre classes on Mondays and Thursdays, Taekwondo on Mondays, Tuesdays, and sometimes Wednesdays, once a month games night, homeschool skating, park days, Science Olympiad. We ate a lot of fast food, drank a lot of sodas, didn't get enough rest, didn't get enough academics, didn't have a set schedule, didn't have a clean house, and ached for time to just be a family. By May 31, I was celebrating because we could do school work all summer and that the only activity we had going through the summer regularly was Taekwondo.
July has been our official start to our new school year since we started homeschooling because of the Carolina heat in July and August. This year, we worked all through June as well. We do morning and evening activities and jam on our school work after lunch. It has worked out well and is the schedule I hope to keep for the school year. We will still have a megaton of activities gearing up around September, but my hope is to get enough school work in these three months, so we can scale back to three days a week for the weeks we will be doing our Tuesday classes. (September through the beginning of December then January through the end of April).
Tuesday classes will help me cover Science, History, Art, and PE for the school aged kids. Though I am teaching Evie's Science Olympiad Class, so I have a lot of work to do in preparation for that class. Time4Learning is going to help me cover the other subjects. I will be supplementing Math with Life of Fred, adding in some additional reading time, writing, and literature for the older two, lots of picture books and early readers for the younger two, and doing a couple of hands on nature projects with all the kids.
I am also implementing a new chore system to help us use our time more wisely. I've broken down all our daily and weekly chores into a manageable list. Fifteen tasks on the daily list and 15 tasks on the weekly list. Evie, Asher, Josh and I will each take 3-4 things on the daily list every day. Isaac and Oz have to be helpers on at least four chores of their choosing. We will work as a team on two or three of the weekly chores. I will also make a detail cleaning list for our once monthly deep clean we already do. Hopefully, this bit by bit system will help the weekly and monthly chores a bit easier.
All this seems like I am adding more and more to my schedule of the things we do. But just like my garden, getting us set up to succeed before things really start "blooming" in September is essential. Getting my calendar planned for the year is essential. Getting all the planning and preparation done so we can execute with efficiency is the only way to prevent burn out for the kids and for myself.
I start planning my garden in December and begin adding layers to my raised lasagna beds in September! I don't plant until March and April. Why do I think I can homeschool successfully and seamlessly without planning at least a few months in advance? Why am I just now realizing this EIGHT YEARS into my homeschooling experience?? Not that we haven't been successful, but I don't feel we have been as successful as we could have been if I had thought of some of this before.
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