After spending all Sunday afternoon tweaking our routine I was looking forward to today. The plan for Monday is a full academic day but I had an early lunch appointment plus I had to do a few business things to do in town – I needed to leave home at 10.45 which cut me short 2 hours of teaching time. I reviewed my plans and decided if I did all the teaching the kids could do all their notebooking / recording / writing etc by themselves once I’d left. Of course, recording straight after the lesson is probably more effective but we needed to be flexible with our plans today.

My lunch date was with a friend who is well trained in teaching mathematics. Her current job is teaching teachers to teach math. Or maybe she teaches the trainers to teach the teachers….. either way she knows her math!! It is always inspiring to talk to her – she has such a way of making math meaningful and painting a context/purpose for studying math. I shared with her many of the living math books that I have bought over the years (I brought them with me just in case we got to talking about math! LOL). It was very encouraging for her to be thrilled with my collection and to write a few titles down. It was reassuring that I am doing good stuff with the kids.

I am really pleased with the work that the children achieved today.

Josh worked with lawn mowing today. He was pretty whacked when he got back and then he went to Bootcamp (fitness group) so he didn’t put in any study today.

Jess worked on her bible study (Heart of Wisdom unit on Wisdom) piano, history and reading all independently. She then had Science with me which included some independent notebooking.

Nomi had Bible study, Australian History and Science with me, which all included notebooking and then she worked on Math, piano, reading, and art by herself. She also wrote an email to a friend.

Daniel also had Bible study, Australian History and Science with me and then notebooked those lessons independently. He also worked on Math, art and photography by himself. Daniel also has a one and half hour routine of occupying himself: free computer, reading and playing in his room by himself. There were a few activities I had planned for Daniel that he didn’t get to but that is okay – the goal is to keep occupied and to learn rather than to complete a list of activities.

I talked with a friend on the phone about parenting stuff this afternoon. We talked a lot about giving the kids choices, what does obedience look like and getting the kids to do chores. In reflecting over that conversation one of the things that strikes me is that we need to know why we do things as a parent. Why do I expect obedience? Why do I expect my children to do chores? Why?  Plus we need to have a long-term view of our parenting – we aren’t fixing irritating issues today – our training is for the long term growth of our children that they may stand tall in their generation in days to come.

I really put my foot in it with my kids this evening. I had to take Josh into town for his fitness group so I had cooked dinner early (with Daniel as he is my cook’s helper this week) and asked the kids to get the house ready for this evening’s meeting while I was gone. When I came back the house was all done but they hadn’t got to my salad yet so I said I’d make the salad and then we’d have dinner. I made the salad and sat down to eat – the kids just looked at me…. “Where’s our dinner?” I had forgotten to serve their dinner! Oops.