I struggle with being an autonomous educator versus a structured classical educator. I have fits and peeks where I go mad and make the kids sit down and do table work and other fun bits....but then I let them go off on tangents. I know neither is wrong and my children are still young at 7 and 5. They love playing "school" where they are the teacher and I am the student...lol which I do find bizzar - they've never been but have such a good idea of how it is it does make me laugh.... But, days like today I find that I have had so many interuptions and am expecting 2 more that we have completely lost momentum and actually I have a splitting headache - so I find motivation hard too some days....and with a young baby and another on the way - I am tireder that I should/would normally be.... But is the motivation/momentum thing experienced by any one else? Should I let them go with the flow of playing their schooly games....as they are generally recapping something useful or do I drag them back kicking and screaming to sit down and do the table work? Just curious :roll: SS
I lose motivation some days too. I sometimes will pop in an educational video or try to get one or two lessons done. There have been other days were I just declared it a day off and we make it up later.
I would probably focus on the basics only (reading, writing, math) and let the rest go with the flow.
Yup. Especially with the 5 year old. Neither of my kids started formal work until they were 8 or 9. Now my daughter is almost 13 and she's doing Latin, French, grammar, writing, punctuation, science, math, history, violin...And it's all pretty rigourous stuff that takes up a good part of the day. In fact I spent the fist few years of homeschooling as a radical unschooler. I learned that a) you can ease into that classical model over the course of years and b) being inconsistent is much worse then simply backing off and easing up. Do what you can consistently do in the run of a day and no more. If it's 15 minutes for the youngest and half and hour or an hour for the older one, that's great. Then you'll have a routine you can build on in the following years.
