Our Average Day

A lot of people have been asking me what our average day is like now. We haven't been doing this long, but this is what's going on right now:

Mondays, I work at the Sol Goldman Y in the morning and L goes to cooking class. (D takes T to nursery on Mondays and Wednesdays). I pick her up around lunchtime, and we go and eat somewhere together. Starting this week, a friend of L's will then be joining us at 12 to do the Story of the World reading and project for the week. At 3, I drop L off at afterschool and then go to the Writers Room to work till 5:30, when I pick L and T up from their various programs. We try to fit in at least a couple of pages of math or penmanship sometime during the day as well. At bedtime, L reads me an easy reader book, or a page from something harder. We do that every night.

Tuesdays, we focus more on work. We drop T off at nursery, and then go to a cafe for breakfast and school. We aim to do 4 pages of math, and 2 letters from her penmanship workbook. We also go to the library and read, and then L can borrow a DVD and any books she wants, while I look for books that are linked to whatever we're studying in Story of the World (right now, Egypt and mummies). At 3, I drop L off and go work.

Wednesdays is another fun day. L & I sleep in while D takes T to school. Then we go to
Homeschool Soccer class at Pier 40. For the next couple of months, we'll also go to the Central Park Zoo one Wednesday a month for zoo class. We pick T up at nursery at 3, then I do a crafts project at home with L, T and her best friend A. I try to fit in some math during the day and we do reading at night.

We drop T off at school in the morning on Thursdays. Starting next week, L will be doing a six-week robotics class in the morning uptown with a bunch of other homeschool kids. They'll be using Lego Simple Machines to make a basic robots each week. The rest of the day will be spent on doing the usual -- math, penmanship, reading. From 3 to 5:30, L is at afterschool and I get to spend time with T, who really is getting the short end of the stick when it comes to attention.

Friday is my day off. Our babysitter comes and takes L & T while I shop for groceries, go to appointments and try to fit in some work. She does a couple of pages of math with L.

Weekends, D does a chapter out of the Real-Science-4-Kids chemistry book with L. This is a really great science curriculum for little kids, written very simply but without it being patronizing or dull. There are fun experiments that walk kindergarteners through the process of scientific inquiry: observation, developing a theory, then testing. Yes, it is from a Christian publishing house but there is no prosletyzing and definitely no mention of creation or intelligent design at this level. Just atoms and molecules.

On Sunday night, I try to do a basic goal for the week, how many pages of math, reading, etc., I would like to get done and that's the bone structure of the week's work. Obviously, this is all sort of idealized. There are days when we just can't get it together to do the program, and then we let it go. Those times are balanced by days when L can't get enough of whatever we're working on and we zoom ahead. And we have the luxury of doing some work on the weekends or holidays if I feel we're way too far behind. I'm aiming to have all the work (in terms of the textbooks we've bought) done by the end of June.

Sounds simple, huh?