Mommy school update

Remember when I blogged about our special three-year-old "Mommy School"  here and here?  I just wanted to update on that really fast (oh..yeah right to the "really fast").

Bryce's special mommy school has been so different than my first experience and even different than what I was expecting with Bryce.  Some good, some not so good.  First of all, it was really hard to find a time that I could spend with just him.  In the afternoon when Brynn was at school, he and Gabe would both nap pretty much the whole time.  And when I would try to hold mommy school during Gabe's first nap, Brynn just couldn't help herself and had to be right in the action which meant she was "helping" way too much.  So, I started combining things.  During Gabe's first nap I get out Brynn's homework and Bryce's school stuff and we do everything together.

Because we do this every day and not every other day (well, also this pregnancy has kicked my trash), I have been less ambitious about finding big projects to work on with Bryce.  In some ways, I feel bad about this but we seem to have fewer power struggles this way anyway.

  The really great part about this is how much Bryce has learned by osmosis while I help Brynn with her homework.  I'll hear him counting father than I know I've gone with him or bring up something about a hexagon and assume he got it from Brynn.

He still has NO interest whatsoever in holding a pencil or crayon.  I often read about how kids get to the pencil phase at different times so sometimes I'll have him write letters in shaving cream or something.  But soon he's going to be in a real preschool and then he'll just have to deal with the pencil thing!  And the following directions thing.  He still has a hard time understanding why it can't always be his way or the highway.  After all, he is just certain that his way is best!

In fact, Gabe is more interested in crayons than he is!  This picture was on a day when I didn't time homework and the nap right, so Gabe got to be involved.

 

I'm realizing I've got less than four weeks until Baby comes and I call mommy school quits for the year.  On the one hand it makes me feel like pulling out all the stops cramming in everything we didn't already do.  But on the other hand it is just not happening. 

 

To me, homeschooling is, just as much as anything, a state of mind.  Even if I drop the formalities for a while, I am planning to still do lots of learning together, lots of library trips, lots of googling all about their questions (not keeping myself too busy to research their questions right away is the key to this), lots of counting the windows on the tunnel at the park, lots of "what letter does that start with," etc.  I'm just trying to decide when to begin the "100 Easy Lessons for Reading" thing, but I'm thinking in the Fall when he goes to formal preschool.  We should be settling into the four kid thing by then, right?  Right?