Something’s gotta give

Homeschooling one child is a challenge. Homeschooling one child with autism is a full time job. Add another child, temporarily, but you have no control over their curriculum, and you realize something’s gotta give. At least until things go back to normal.

Popeye will be done his school year in 3 or 4 weeks, but mentally he’s already on summer break. Yet his teachers are piling on the work. This week he was required to learn his 15 and 16 times tables (really??? We only learned to 12, and I’m pretty sure his teachers only learned to 12 as well. This to me is unnecessary busywork). Popeye also had 1 week to memorize 150 commonly misspelled words – more busywork. If they wanted him to know all 600 words this year, then it would have made more sense to break them up and have the kids memorize 15 a week? Add on the usual workload of math, creative writing, grammar, reading comprehension, and social studies, and this child is overloaded. He basically has shut down. I don’t blame him. I’m shutting down too.

Then there’s Peanut’s work. Because I’m having to basically spoon feed Popeye his work because the public school system does not encourage independent thinkers, I have a lot less time to spend with Peanut. I’m finding Peanut is now shutting down too. This week we only stuck to the absolute basics – math, language arts, and reading. I can honestly say we didn’t always get it done either.

This has given me the opportunity to really look at Peanut’s curriculum. Really be brutally honest with myself and use a critical eye about each and every thing we use. Some of it shines through, but some of it really isn’t working, even though I’m really trying to make it work. But I’m done with ‘trying to make it work’. Life shouldn’t be that hard, not now. Not ever.

Last week I did a post on the Good and the Beautiful’s math 1. I’ve pretty much changed my views on it. Not that it’s a bad curriculum. It actually is amazing. It just isn’t for us, not right now. It’s too teacher intensive, plus I have to spend a good half hour every night reading over the next day’s lesson, then condensing it into a bare bones lesson and figure out how to implement it. And it takes us between half and hour to an hour to get through it, mainly because Peanut tries to use every stalling tactic known to man to get out of it. Yep, “I need to pee, I need to poop, I’m hungry, the dog needs to go out, the dog needs to come in” and so on… sigh. I look at that math binder and I cringe every day. Even Peanut hates it. So with great sorrow, it’s going to be put in our “not working” pile of curriculum, at least for now. Maybe once Popeye is done school and I have more time for Peanut, we can revisit it.

I dusted off Math Mammoth, but this time I left it on the computer and let Peanut type his answers in directly on the pdf, and it’s working like a charm!

Peanut’s school day now looks something like this:

• Explode the Code: 4 to 6 pages on the computer – peanut has dysgraphia so I scan the pages in and convert them so he can type directly on them.   10 minutes
• Math Mammoth: 2 to 3 pages on the computer. 15-20 minutes
• Miniature Masterminds Math: 1 to 2 pages. 5 minutes
• Saxon Math: I act as his scribe. 10 minutes

Now Peanut gets a much deserved break, usually a good 45 minutes to an hour!

• Language Arts: 1 lesson of the Good and the Beautiful Level 1. 15 to 20 minutes
• Miniature Masterminds: Reading Comprehension. 10 to 15 minutes
• Spelling You See: I have him type the words on the computer. 5 to 10 minutes

Peanut’s second break.

Finally we end with either Science of Social Studies (alternating days) This takes between 15 minutes and a few hours depending on what rabbit holes we follow.

• Science: Miniature Masterminds Science (spine) with various resources to reinforce the topic (ie videos, hands on experiments, interactive notebooking)
• History: A Child Through Time (spine) we do 1 or 2 children per week, and reinforce it with Story of the World. We choose something interesting on the page to focus on (ie. mammoths, pyramids, etc) and go down the rabbit holes!

One thing I’ve noticed is that I’m missing the ease of Easy Peasy Homeschool. I am truly considering going back to it for next year, but with all the changes to both its format and the loss of Flash, it’s not the awesome and fun curriculum it used to be. Still, I’m going to give it a good look again and see if it’s in the running for our next year. I’m also thinking of going back to a unit studies approach. We loved Moving Beyond the Page 4-5, and have never found another one like it. Five in a Row comes close, except it isn’t open and go, and getting all the books shipped in here will be expensive. I also stumbled across Homeschool Complete a while ago, and that one looks promising, and it even includes math. This may be the one for us – it’s a pdf download, so Peanut can even do it on the computer! We’ll see. The only drawback is that it’s very USA centric. … I still have about 2 more months to decide.

Oh, I discovered a couple of drops of vanilla extract in my coffee is soothing on those “I need more caffeine” days.