End Week 3

It's been fun. Really, it has, but it's not you. It's me. I just.. can't do this anymore. I need my freedom to do what I want to, whenever I want to. I just can't do that with you and I'm afraid it's time for me to move on. I wish you the best and I'm sure you will provide plenty of other people with happiness. Oh, but I'm keeping the literature books..... and the history books..... basically all the resources, but you can keep the schedule and most of the activities.... Thanks and really, I'm so very sorry.

I think it's a success that I stayed scheduled for three weeks and ended only a day and a half behind. This week I realized the schedule was making me miserable. We zoomed from Big Bang to Mammals in THREE WEEKS! I guarantee Tamarin didn't retain anything. Hell, I don't think I retained much of anything.

The activities are neat, but most of them are for older kids. Like this paper volcano I put together. The kids thought it was cool, but there was little in the plan for explaining volcanoes. It simply went with the couple of pages on the formation of the earth in the Usborne Encyclopedia of World History.

I mean, where's the science experiment to go with it? Even if you skip baking soda and vinegar you could use melting wax and talk about how it hardens as it cools. I didn't do any of that because the volcano was just a small snippet in the schedule and I wanted to stay on schedule.

Howler thought the volcano looked like a butt with the crack down the middle of it (It kinda does...) And, of course, I've already lost the other half of it. It basically was a bust. A waste of printer ink and time. No real educational value because there was nothing hands on to help them relate the facts I gave them with something they could experience.

I did like the timeline of a week template.

I don't regret starting the year with it. There are great resources in there if you have the time to go fishing for them. I LOVE the poetry book (though I haven't been using the poems she suggested).

I think it's time to set Bringing Up Learners into the resource category and come up with my own plan again. I just felt like it was text fact heavy. Even if my kids were older... it would still be text fact heavy and my kids don't learn that way.

Next week it's back to square one. This time, my way instead of someone else's.