School Break

Our summer break seemed to come upon us suddenly this year.  I wasn't sure I wanted to break our routine, since a lot of our routine school work wasn't much trouble for me to plan and kept the big kids occupied in the mornings, but as it did appear on the horizon, I realized that both Caleb and I needed change and we needed it now!

In preparing for our break I made 5 goals:
1.  Purge
2.  Read
3.  Dance (& Sing)
4.  Paint
5.  Play Outside


More specifically:
1.  To get rid of stuff we don't need or want (I read a quote on a Charlotte Mason website - It is hard to have a peaceful home when you have a lot of possessions.)
2.  To read good books aloud and silently.
3.  To listen to a variety of types of music and dance and sing along.
4.  To learn some painting techniques and practice them.
5.  To go outside and enjoy the weather, to notice the bugs, flowers, and people in our neighborhood.

Moving up to a real bike!

These were the goals I shared with the kids, my other goal - secretly - was to get back into the habit of checking on their chores.  Certain children were faithfully doing their chores while Mom was distracted with the baby, while others clearly did not!

She's not a thumb sucker - she likes all her fingers AND the pacifier.

I made a checklist for the chores and included a section for our goals.  My goal for the goals is to do something goal oriented at least 3 times a day.  We never get all 5 in one day!  I can only handle paint about once a week at the most!  The checklist has very successfully reduced the chore slacking.

An additional motivation for the purge is that my neighbor is collecting items for a Relay for Life yard sale, so it helps to think it's all going to help others.

For reading - I've been asking the kids to spend 30 minutes reading - probably something I should have been doing for a while!  oh well.. you can't undo the past!  We are moving forward.  I'm reading Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder to Natalie and Tanglewood Tales by Nathanial Hawthorne to the big kids.  In the process I discovered that not only did Natalie not know bears hibernate, she also wasn't 100% sure they weren't mythical creatures and that the big kids thought the word abominable meant something positive!  Thank you Monsters Inc.!

For music - my neighbor's friend's son(!) goes to a Waldorf School and it made me curious about how they do things - they are NOT very mainstream let's say! - and one thing they practice is eurythmics - which is an expressive form of dancing.  I guess they have some method, but we are going for free style.  I thought the girls would like it and I thought it would add an extra bit of understanding to listen to music that goes along with something else we are experiencing.  For example - listening to fiddle music while reading Little House books.  What we've been listing to this week is called Caribbean Playground and it has children's songs from different islands in the Caribbean.  Since Miami is a very Caribbean place, it's pretty relevant!   At first the kids didn't like it, but after a couple of listens, they thought the songs were catchy.  I've always liked steel pan, so it is right up my alley!

For paint - we have been looking at an art book by Bob Ross.  There are Bob Ross videos on Youtube.  Bob Ross was so amazingly inspiring.  You watch him paint and think, oh I could totally do that!  But what we did most recently was watch a Mr Otter's Art Studio tutorial and painted it.  They turned out much nicer than I expected and if I remember to photograph them, I will post them here.

Play outside is easy.  It is so beautiful right now that you feel like you are wasting daylight being indoors.  It has not been as cool or dry this year, but we know that drippy, humid days are not far away and we want to be outside as much as we can.

So that is kind of a lot for a break!  But most of it is the sort of stuff we do anyway and the sort of stuff we've not been able to do either because of school or because of Irene or because I've gotten lazy.  The main thing really is being outside.  You can't seem to keep from learning out there.