The Game of Homeschooling

I've been on hiatus from the blog for almost a month. I've got two six-year-olds, now. And since things have settled down with the cub (who had his two-month check up today and is doing great), we're trying to find a new schedule that works for everyone. We've added family game time after dinner and are considering what chores we should instate. And I've got about 8 months before I have to start reporting homeschooling hours to the district.

We've been taking it fairly easy. They color and draw, occasionally paint, and do crafts from kiwi crate. We play mousetrap, which involves some light math (who has the most cheese?) and reading since we make them read the instructions on the spaces themselves ("take 3 pieces of cheese  from rival with the most). It also involves some fun social interaction. We have them determine what piece needs to be built next, and often require that they describe it to the player who needs to build and try to communicate where to place it. But the biggest goal of game time is to spend time with them.

We also play card games: war, go fish, crazy 8's, etc. There's some light math there, but mostly it's just a lot of fun and laughter.

This is Math Dice being played

For their birthday, they got a couple of dice games for math and reading/spelling. I'm not sure they're quite ready for those yet, though. We haven't tried the reading game, but the math game proved to be fairly slow-going, and we grownups can't really play it with them with any fairness. The game involves one die that is rolled to determine the total, then several other dice are rolled and the player can add or subtract (or both) the numbers on the other dice in order to arrive at the total. They can do subtraction, but they aren't very fast at it and it's still an abstract concept to them. So, when they roll the dice for their math game, if they need to make 3, and they have 5 and 2 available, they can make 7 in their heads fairly quickly, but it might not even occur to them that they could also make 3 unless you remind them to subtract. And if they had 6, 4, and 1, they certainly wouldn't come up with 6 - 4 + 1 = 3 just yet.

Next month, the twins start community center activities. C chose guitar lessons, and S chose soccer. I'm thinking I might take some of the mommy and me cooking classes with M, just for fun. I'm very excited to push them out into the world where they can make friends and learn things I'm not personally able to teach them.

Their lives up to now have been fairly crazy. They're 6 years old and have lived in 5 different states, so they haven't had much of an opportunity to settle in to one neighborhood, get used to a house, or make friends. Where we are now, we plan to stay for a long while.