Weekly goals

After several woeful attempts at homeschool preschool this year, I finally settled on something that works for us. My failed attempt this fall was to set up a little schedule with small amounts of time loosely devoted to different things I wanted to teach the kids. I put together six weeks worth of prep sheets, but after all my those were done, I could never find time to do more. Keep in mind--I need prep sheets. I don't do well just throwing things together and my kids can sense my fluster a mile away. If I'm not sure what activity we're doing, things are bound to denegrate into fits followed by Scooby-Doo episodes. (Bridger told me he can learn about mythological creatures by watching Scooby-doo--see what I'm up against?).

I can't be too hard on myself because I took a full-time stint back at my Philly job (from home, obviously) September through February and have been taking other freelance work since. This is also why I finally caved and started the boys in preschool in March. But back to my original premise--something that's working.

Instead of having daily work that I can't really quantify, I started thinking of two or three weekly goals for both the boys. They vary from Bridger learning to tie his shoes and Asher learning to put on his clothes to Bridger counting by 5's and Asher learning to spell his name. We work on mainly those goals each day of the week--sometimes they are really difficult (I admit the tying shoes one is still ongoing) and sometimes they are mastered within a day. Once they feel confident with their knowledge, they complete their goal for Ryan. If he is satisfied, the boys recieve "kid cash" for each of their accomplishments which they can use to buy an extra dessert or tv show.

I'm really excited about this because I feel like it could be something I continue through school to enrich their education. After many hours of thought and prayer, we will be sending Bridger to public FULL day kindergarten next year. Academics isn't the only thing I'm concerned about, but I hope this tradition can continue. Mostly it depends on me continuing to think up interesting goals--and the kids caring enough about Scooby-doo episodes to save up their kid cash.