Thursday, September 04, 2008

Details of Mondays

I'm slowly going through the days of the week and trying to list out what "belongs" to that day, for the Year 7 and Year 1 children.

So here is Monday. ... which Kieron (Year 7) and I agreed ought to be the lightest of the days provided that he mostly finished his work the week before.

Most of the things on the list only take 5-10 minutes and most are review/reinforcement type activities.

Is this level of detail necessary? No, it's not. When I had a whole handful in the homeschool, and a baby in arms, I simply did not lay things out so precisely.

Is it helpful? In many ways it is, for someone like me who gets stuck on retrieval. In a book I read by CS Lewis, he spoke of how the ancients tended to divide things into threes -- there was always a "middle ground" between one thing and another. In Catholic thinking, you have "proximate" (close view), "remote" (the big picture or distant goal) and "mediate"(the in between stage). I usually have the most trouble with the middle ground.... that is, how to get from the big picture to the details of daily life, and vice versa. So a lot of this planning I do is about translating my overall goals into something I can actually sit down and work on in daily life.

Clear as mud? LOL. Homeschooling is as simple as a parent, a child, and whatever they are focusing on.... a sort of triangle. All you really need are books, paper, writing and/or drawing implements, the concrete details of daily life, plus a sort of "narrative" -- ongoing conversation and rhythm of relationship, that makes meaning of the concrete details. And time to play and think and explore.

The castle is there on the form to remind me of that -- since I'm a visual right-brained type : ). But I wanted to write it out, too.

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