Yesterday was my anxiety school day, which seems to happen pretty regularly around here with the age spread of kids. I think I have come up with a new evil plan which may work. The difficulty around here has been older children who are resistant to getting up in the morning and hitting the books. Then of course there is the struggle of who is going to watch the short people while I work with ANY of them. So........I am letting my older kids sleep as long as they want and I am going to spend time with the younger set with their school work in the morning while they are fresh. The older kids will also need to watch the Evans till I am done with the younger kids so I can actually teach them to read etc.
Then.....the older children are going to have their school in the afternoon and evening. Night school. They seem to suffer from the ongoing illusion that when dad comes home from work, that they are done with school for the day. I am hoping the dad can help with the short people putting them to bed, while I work with the older children. This plan has potential. Even if I can only pull off three nights of quality time with the older students, then they will get more done in quiet and my younger children will not be cheated of time with mom.
I am also going to talk with another mom locally about trading watching our younger children once a week each, so she can teach her nine year old and then that would give me one other day and time too to attend to my older childrens' school work.
This seems a better plan than throwing the kids on the bus. I REALLY do NOT want to do that but if push comes to shove, some of them might have to. Having seven kids at home has its challenges to be sure. Here's hoping this plan helps.
Studies show that younger kids do better in the mornings, and middle/high school students actually do better in the late morning/afternoons/evenings. So, I think you're plan has a potential of working really well!
ReplyDeleteThis is brilliant. I need to write this down so I can remember it in a couple years when my oldest actually figures out how wonderful sleep is! :D
ReplyDeleteI plan to report on how this is going. The kids didn't know about it til they got up yesterday. Two things this will relieve.....the fight to get them up and the fight to get them to go to bed. The ten year old might actually volunteer to be a younger kid and the 8 year old feels cheated that he can't stay up and do school work.......hmmmmm......it will become the "Large Family Homeschool Survival Plan".
ReplyDeleteWe did this for awhile. It worked pretty well, except for math. My brain is too tired to teach Calculus at 10 or 11 o'clock in the evening. Two of my students really paid a heavy price the following year, because they had to complete almost 1 1/2 years of math in one year. Maybe your brain works better than mine. My husband doesn't get home from work until after 9:30 at night, so teaching it earlier in the evening was too difficult with so much interference from the younger crowd. Hope it works well for you!
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