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| 'Kandarian' disease resistant cooking banana. Good ripe too! |
Stop. Think. Act [A sign in our house used to read this for a member of the family who often acted without thinking.]
After stopping to think things through I discovered that the overwhelmed feeling taking away the fun of learning could be fixed by doing one day of school per day. Simple right.....
Well when we started to use Sonlight we slid into 6 days of school a week. When Eli and Anna attended international school they left the house around 6:30 a.m. and returned between 3:30 and 4. Starting at 7 a.m. taking a nice long break at noon and then finishing up around 3 p.m. we easily completed more than a day's lessons. Great. We finished one day and started the next with any 'extra time'.
Everyone remained happy. More time at home. More time to play with friends. Rare homework [which for Eli the year before took 1-2 hours at night]. And the accelerated pace worked out very well with our scheduled time in the USA.
Fast forward to now. More complicated classes take more time. Pressure causes frustration which removes the joy and fun of learning and spills over into the rest of life making positive attitudes hard to maintain.
What if we slowed down? Did not need to work so hard to 'keep up'. How can one feel 'behind' one's self when going at a rapid pace? Silly I know. What if?? A bit of math showed that even with the majority of weeks only finishing 5 days of lessons a week we will likely finish this school year and the whole next year before our tentative visit to the USA next fall.
We can use any extra time to explore interesting subjects in depth or additional subjects of interest. What a concept!! Yes I admit sometimes I learn things slowly and the hard way. Sadly sometimes my kids join me in the painful learning process.
So WHY push it? No reason at all other than we fell back into a routine that no longer fits or works for us. We did not think through the schedule. We let habit rule over being intentional and rational. Mistake.
So this week we started anew. A fresh plan. Only time will tell if the 5 days a week works for us or not.
Eli and Anna proposed maybe every other week-a 6 day week, once they 'catch up'. But maybe this time we can evaluate more intentionally avoiding building up frustrations and resentments.
Back to that great life word. FLEXIBILITY.
Thankful: Pastor Rigo's wife and newborn son doing well.
Prayer: Revival meetings at Fauche church this week.
2 comments:
This is really cool! As someone reading your blogs I want to say that it is obvious that God is at work in your family and that you are tuning in to him. It's very encouraging to read about. I hope the change makes for a great week of school. I think we have an extra bonus when we read your blogs because we can picture what you are talking about. And I'm so glad Pastor Rigo's son is born and doing well!
Great thoughts! I know with our math there are six lessons to a chapter. If they "get it" and do well on pages A and B, then they get to skip C and move on to D, E and F (which includes review from past math lessons as well). The point is that they learn, right? So if they've got it down in 2 or 4 days instead of 5 or 6, why keep at it? I've learned to not beat the proverbially dead horse over the head.
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