Leaping From The Box

Just a quick reminder about my personal blog, Musings, Mischief and Mayhem. Recent posts have included wedding pictures of our youngest child and other related family news. If you are curious about the person behind LeapingFromTheBox.com, check it out!

Continuing with our Homeschool Mixer Questions,

6. What does your daily schedule look like?

Our schedules always varied, depending upon the season and the activities that the children were involved in. And honestly, it is difficult to remember exact schedules from ten or twelve years ago! Most of the time the children slept late, arising anywhere from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. (yes, I did say slept late!). A lot depended upon what activities they were scheduled to go to and when they were younger, early teens, they got up earlier than 11. But morning activities were always a challenge for us, especially if it meant getting up and eating food before driving anywhere!

Any academics that we did together were done in the afternoon. Usually we were reading aloud (me reading, children listening) from some work of literature; two or three afternoons a week I would read aloud for an hour or more. I also read aloud history. History is my love and not a subject that my children would usually read on their own (unless they found a particular time or place they were extremely interested in), so I would read whatever history book I thought they might enjoy. My children loved being read aloud to and I hated reading aloud (still do), but I spent many hours doing so, even until they were well into their teens.

7. Are your kids always polite and ready to learn?

Huh?! You’ve got to be kidding! First, with our method of homeschooling, unschooling, they learned what they were interested in, for the most part. So if they were interested, I suppose they were ready to learn. As for polite, well, mostly. I suppose some very strict families would have considered them occasionally rude or inconsiderate or likely even disrespectful, but I had different standards and so I felt they were just normal children. Well, maybe not normal, as that was always considered a bad word in our house!

8. Do the kids (or you!) get frustrated?

Of course! We all got frustrated at times. That’s just a part of living together, being a family, not really a by-product of homeschooling.

9. How has this affected your parenting?

I thought these were homeschooling questions?! I never found a magic pill to dispel frustration. It was just something we had to work through. Communication, time, patience, all factor into dealing with frustration, but I have no pat answers for this one.

10. How much free time do they have?

Most of their day was their free time, to do with as they wished, dictated by our outside activities schedule. They had chores to do, helping around the house with kitchen duties and laundry and such. And we would try to plan reading together time several days a week, along with some board game / card game playing time. But all things considered, most of their days were their time.

11. What do they do during their free time?

Learn. Live. Explore. Grow.

12. What hobbies do they have?

Hobby is an interesting word and not one I have really used since we began homeschooling / unschooling. A hobby to me is something you do to take you away from your every day world, let you forget the stress of work or life and just enjoy some small area of your life. As unschoolers, we tend to gravitate naturally to those areas that would be considered a “hobby” and consider that a part of our life. Interests my children have had that they have made a part of their life, but might be considered hobbies, are many. Some they have held on to for years, continuing to do them as adults, even working to turn them into a career option. Some they have let lie fallow while pursuing other interests. Here are just a few over the last twelve years of homeschooling:

Martial Arts (Karate, Jujitsu)
Web Design
Game Programming
Writing / Blogging / FanFic
Basketball (and Soccer and Softball)
Reading
RPG’s (Role Playing Games)
X-Box (and PlayStation and Wii)
King Arthur Lore
Celtic History / Lore / Music / Culture

Tomorrow I will finish answering the Homeschool Mixer Questions. The last questions are:

13. What difficulties and challenges do you have with homeschooling?
14. What makes homeschooling enjoyable?
15. How do you get involved in the community?
16. When do you have opportunities to interact with public or privately schooled children?
17. Would you like more of these opportunities?
18. How can they be created?
19. What is your least favorite homeschool stereotype?

My regular readers no doubt have been wondering about my blogging absence. My apologies for leaving you hanging on the Audacity of Hope review. I do hope to finish that up soon. Life intruded, as it often does. In late April our daughter and two-year-old granddaughter came to live with us. And just as suddenly, two weeks later, our youngest child decided to move back to Alabama. He had turned eighteen in March and decided his life was in Alabama. We wish him luck, miss him terribly, and hope he finds what he needs.

So, within a two-week time period from late April to early May, our household increased from four to six and then went down to five. Miss Munchkin, our granddaughter, is a very busy two-year-old and it is taking Grandma quite some time to adjust from having quiet peaceful days to busy toddler-chasing days while Miss Munchkin’s Mommy goes back to work fulltime. It has been a long time since I had a two-year-old in the household full time and there are days that I am sure I am much too old for it all! I think, though, that we are finally beginning to settle into a bit of a routine.

Beginning Again

So it appears that, instead of being done with homeschooling children, I am beginning all over again! Miss Munchkin is at that age where she soaks up everything, misses nothing, and repeats everything you say. Words are beginning to string together to create short sentences. She is getting taller and we have to keep pushing things further and further back on the counters. You can read about the fun we are having with the refrigerator on my Musings, Mischief and Mayhem blog, Refrigerator Fascination. Any and all advice would be greatly appreciated!

It has been a number of years since I had my toddlers, so I would love to hear ways in which to keep her brain working and her body out of trouble! She has been learning ASL for the last year from the Signing Time series and we just received Volume 11: My Neighborhood and Volume 12: Time to Eat in the mail this week. Her very favorite activity is playing with her wooden ABC puzzles. But we need something new and frankly, Grandma is feeling more tired than creative. Access to the public library is a once a week thing right now, as transportation is a bit of an issue. So we need simple things we can do inside an apartment, as it is now 97 degrees outside here in north Florida!

One great thing we did earlier this week was move Uncle Charles’s discarded mattress to the living room floor. Oh, that is great fun to jump on and dance on and tumble on and run around. Did I mention that Miss Munchkin is active? Grandma is certainly getting her workout these days!