Hellacious Weeks 5 and 6 of Home "School"

Something broke last week.  We lost our groove.  T is punching his brother.  PJ is asking to go to school.  T is getting anxiety over thinking about a family trip mid-October.  Just shoot me.

We started off the week last week with optimism and some drive.  They each took a turn on Dreambox for math.  T was struggling with sorting 10s and 1s and the all the possible combinations of that.  I reached for the base 10 blocks and showed him how they could group.  He resisted even looking at the blocks, and then conceded that it made sense.  Whenever he hits something that he doesn't know, the boy freezes up!  Ugh.

PJ asks to play math games on the tablet and the next thing I know he's playing Angry Birds.  Busted.  He's grounded from screens for the day.

By mid-week we were bustling around getting ready for PJ's 6th birthday party.  He just wanted to have his few friends over for a "messy party" that consisted of a dinosaur dig (sand+plaster of paris), silly string fight, shaving cream play, cornstarch and water and flour and water stations, and a slime center.  It was messy.  His cake was a custom Mommy Creation - Minecraft.  He loved it.

I also had to use up those beautiful apples we got up in the mountains the week before.  While I peeled and sliced, PJ searched for recipes on the tablet and read me the ingredients.  He learned cup, tsp, tbsp.  I was quite impressed he had the patience to review it with me.

The T Man was assigned a fact-finding mission.  I asked him to choose a country and find five interesting facts about it on Google.  First he chose Asia - and I explained to him that Asia is not a country and we walked over to the World Map on the classroom wall for a quick review.  I think he was embarassed, but isn't this what "school" is for?   In the end he chose Brazil, specifically Rio.  Here are his findings: 



 

We did this video, because T really hates writing anything down.  This is apparently pretty typical for gifted boys.  Even so, during the last few weeks, I have been able to coerce some writing out of him.  He tries to get my requirement from 5 sentences down to three.  This week's writing wasn't from one of the prompts in his book.  He just wrote some lines down on the back of the book and wrote:

"One day i was attacked by a ... taco.  It tried to eat me. {wait shouldn't it be the other way round?}  lucky me I had a knife. {I don't know why}  Then I sliced him (or "it") in half.  I had defeated him.  

the end 

Note: The braces were conversation bubbles on the opposite page.  

I don't know whether to be impressed or horrified.

PJ produced this little beauty today.  He flipped through his First Grade workbook after studying sentence formation, "naming words" and periods, did a little math and decided that counting the dots and decoding the colors was an awesome idea.  Ohhhhkay, I'll go with that.  T would have cried if I asked him to color anything at age 6!!

    

This week PJ and I moved onto double digit addition.  There weren't any tears because we quit 12 problems into the lesson, after seeing the horrified expression that came over PJ's face at the problem:  23 + 37.  We'll see those again in a day or two.  Ha ha

 

PJ has asked several times to go back to school but I refuse to put him into the local LAUSD school just out of sheer fear of what could happen.  (In case you are wondering why, you can check out the earlier blog on our experience with the school system here).  I was feeling so down about our effort to homeschool, I did actually try to place him in his best friend's school this week, as much as I didn't think it was a great idea for the whole family.  But I was turned down for financial aid and I don't think it's SUCH a great idea to turn our lives upside down trying to pull the money together for it each month.  These are the days I shake my head and wish we actually had a CHOICE of where we put our tax money.  And I question - if we aren't using this money for my kid's spot in school, where does it go?  And then I move on.

 

It hasn't been easy to motivate these two lately and I am wishing they were more self-motivated to do anything other than play video games. There are days I want to just want to look at job ads. But maybe tomorrow will be better?   I am ever hopeful.  I am not afraid to change my strategy.  And I also happen to really like my boys, so that helps. A lot.