Today is Day 2 of 31 for 21 – a month long blogging effort to raise awareness of Down syndrome.  You can check out other bloggers participating here.

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I really enjoyed the holidays but it’s so nice to be getting back to our regular routine!  It took a couple of weeks to ease from the summer into our homeschooling schedule.  We hardly had a chance for it to feel like a routine before the holidays came along.  I’ve spent this week getting back into our homeschooling routine, and the first two days of the week felt like herding cats.  But we’re getting there – by the beginning of next week I expect to be back to normal.

I thought I’d share about what homeschooling looked like today. Not because it was impressive or unusual or because we covered an astonishing amount of material.  It wasn’t and we didn’t.  That’s why I thought I’d share – because it’s a simple and minimally scripted day.

It’s so hard to remember these details at the end of a day and I know I’ve left things out but I’ll share what I can remember.

I started the day by reading a new book to the younger boys.  After we finished the book I davened with ds4, then with ds6 (they do different things), then reread the new book to all the boys again.  After that I made breakfast and while we ate, I talked to them about the plan for the day.  The kids said they wanted to learn about penguins, and ds7 told me about a handout from his teacher in school of a polar bear and a penguin in the Arctic.  I told him that penguins and polar bears actually live on different sides of the world and don’t encounter each other in nature, which prompted them to ask what land animal is the natural predator of a penguin.  I asked them for their ideas on this, and told them we’d look it up later to see if they were right.

We cleaned up from breakfast and the older kids sat down with their math.  I sat down with ds4 and ds6 with a hundred number chart and we found some interesting patterns.  We read some poems of Robert Louis Stevenson (A Child’s Garden of Verses), then read several stories from Nach (Prophets) about Eliyahu and Elisha.  We read some parsha as well, then ds7 listened to two portions of the parsha leined aloud while he followed along.

Yirmiyahu at some point watched his daily pictures and words on the computer that is part of an early reading program that we started for him very recently.  Ds4 and ds6 enjoy watching this with him; it’s fun and relaxed for them all.   He watches it for five minutes in the morning and five minutes in the evening (if I remember).  He and I both prefer physical flashcards; I’d love to print out cards and laminate them but don’t have a printer or a laminator, and doing this here will be an expensive project so for now I’m sticking to the program and the cards I already bought.

One of the kids told me he wanted to learn about crocodiles, not penguins, which reminded me about a two minute National Geographic clip I had seen of a jaguar stalking a caiman.  So I showed it to them, and after we discussed it told them we’d have to save more crocodile learning for another day since the penguins were requested first. 🙂 Ds7 read three Hebrew storybooks aloud to us (me, ds4 and ds6) while we snuggled on the couch.

Ds4 and ds6 spent an hour playing with blocks and Lincoln Logs; they’re in the middle of building some kind of city.  I’m glad we rearranged our home so we now have a playroom, because I can leave their creations like this out for a while and give them a chance to finish them.  I wanted ds7 to do his math then, but he was resistant, telling me he doesn’t know how to do it.  I realized he was intimidated by the questions on his lesson for the day – I only introduced subtraction with carrying in two digit problems the lesson before the holidays and he needed a refresher before taking on three digit problems.  I asked him to take out his base ten blocks to demonstrate but decided against showing him again since I felt his focus wasn’t there and it would be better to take a break from math for a while.

Dd12 came in to ask me about some questions on measuring angles.  I’m happy to say that in the few weeks since we started homeschooling, despite all the breaks for the holidays, she’s covered almost a half a year of math.  I’d like her to do two years of math this year to get her back up to the level she was on before she went to school.  Amazingly enough she managed to stay in the higher math class during that time.  While I explained the angle questions, I put on a short math video (from the Discovery Education subscription that I have) for ds7 about subtraction with borrowing.  I’ve never used any math videos and was impressed with how clearly it was presented.

I just showed him 15 minutes of the 50 minute clip that was relevant to him.  It was obvious as I sat next to him watching that he understood the concept.  So I got out his notebook and wrote out about fifteen new questions for him, starting with a few two digit questions and then the rest three digits like the ones from his lesson that he thought were too hard for him.  It’s not worth directly challenging something so small as this; better to show than to tell.  He very quickly did all of the questions without any mistakes.

By now it was time to make lunch so I looked in the fridge to decide what to make.  I took out a large container of cooked chickpeas, threw them in with the onions I had peeled and diced right after breakfast (thinking I’d use them for something!), then added a package of ground meat, sauce and spices – this is how I cook, making up things along the way.  I started a pot of rice cooking to go with the stew, and added carrots to the purple and green cabbage I had chopped a couple of days before, then mixed in the last of the homemade dill dip and lunch was on its way!

While the food was cooking, I put on a video about animal life in the Antarctic to follow up on the penguin discussion from earlier in the day.  This is geared to upper elementary and high school aged kids but our little kids enjoy these kind of programs – I always tell them if it doesn’t interest them they don’t have to watch.  The older kids had finished their work for the day and we all watched together.  Everyone except dd13, who is glued to her Kindle thanks to the library books I checked out for her a couple of days ago.  (This is her extra reading and doesn’t count for her school reading – she could easily rack up six hours a day of reading.)

Over lunch – it was past 2 pm by now –  I read them an encyclopedia article about penguins and that officially wrapped up penguins for the day.  After lunch I took a couple of the boys with me to do some shopping.  We were going to have a playdate with friends but by the time we got back it was late in the afternoon.  So instead, so we set out for the library. They enjoyed choosing their books and sitting in the library and reading books that we weren’t checking out.  We came home and while we got dinner ready, the boys took out their books from the library and sat down to read them.  After we had dinner, dh put the boys to bed (I know he finished a read aloud with ds11 tonight but I’m not sure what stories the younger boys got).

What’s really interesting is how each day is so different from another, while still having the same basic schedule.  Yesterday we did lots of Hebrew language, learned about human digestion and then the digestion of carnivorous plants, ds7 read some books in English aloud, they did a lot of drawing (dh gave dd a drawing lesson earlier this week so she’s been practicing drawing the perceptions that he taught her), hours of playing with blocks, and friends were over to play.  So many ways to enjoy life together!

Avivah