My MOTH Schedule

After 7+ years of homeschooling and hearing boat loads of recommendations, I finally broke down and bought the MOTH book. In case you aren't a homeschooler or are a homeschooler who lives in a cave, MOTH stands for Managers of Their Homes. It is a "how to" scheduling book written by Steve and Teri Maxwell - business owners, convention speakers, and a homeschooling family of 8 children.

I guess you have to know me to understand what a HUGE leap this was. I have always been more of a "fly by the seat of my pants" kind of girl with an unwritten schedule floating around in my head. I have a rough plan for our days, but the idea of a rigid schedule is frightening and a little suffocating.

This year however, I am teaching 3 different grades at home as well as a co op class on Fridays, shuffling the girls to field trips and club meetings and taking care of our maniacal (yet somewhat better trained than last year) dog. Somewhere in all that craziness, I needed to fit in personal time (you know - time for Bible reading, exercising and showering) and at least make an attempt at cleaning the house. Add to that my own leanings toward ADHD, an ADD husband and at least one ADHD daughter and you can imagine the fun we can have around our house without a routine in place. We decided that if the Maxwells could run a business and homeschool their children while maintaining their sanity - they were probably the ones I needed to go to for help.

I haven't ironed out all the kinks yet, but here is the rough draft of our new schedule (in case you were interested). The white spaces in the middle of the third/Evening sheet are free time. I wanted to leave myself some wiggle room in case school went longer than I anticipated or there was some other interruption to our day.


Morning / Midday / Evening


Now all I have to do is FOLLOW the schedule and we'll be good to go.

Writing the schedule wasn't all that difficult. The idea is to make a list of all the things you need to do in a day/week, assign each task a block of time (typically 1/2 or 1 hour) and then fit them all on your schedule like a giant puzzle. The book was great because Teri gave lots of good advice about how to handle various scheduling issues, getting your children to work together and getting the dreaded chores finished. She also did a great job reminding me about what my priorities are - something I often forget when life gets too busy.

As I said, the process was not difficult, but it was time consuming. However thinking it through in this manner helped me plan for our weak areas - namely, what I want two of the girls to do while I'm working with the third. "Go play in the other room" just wasn't cutting it anymore! Right now I'm working on planning activities for the girls to do together during that time - like movies, legos, playdoh, drawing, etc so they have a little direction to their playtime. I was also able to schedule computer time for everyone (so I don't have to answer that question 100 times each day) and there was even time left over for an hour of family fun each night.

I'm just saying a prayer that it will all work!

I always thought the MOTH book was a little too expensive, but honestly, it will be worth every penny if it brings some semblance of order to our house and cuts out just 50% of the "what are we doing next?" questions.

Four days down, 176 to go!

Believe it or not - we just finished the 1st week of our 7th year of homeschooling. It's kind of hard to wrap my brain around it! Even though we're moving into the "veteran" stage of homeschooling now, I continue to learn new things about this lifestyle, teaching and my children.

So this week I learned....

1. No matter how prepared I think I am, I'm always woefully unprepared.
2. Sometimes the best lessons involve a 15 minute walk in the yard.
3. If I want the kids to learn something, all I need to do is put it under a vinyl tablecloth and they'll learn it. Even my 3yo is learning where the states are because her big sisters play "USA Bingo" (a game they invented) every time they're at the table. It's funny to hear Sadey talk about Montana, Mississippi and West Virginia one minute and then try to convince me that "A" really does say "meow" a few minutes later.
4. Crafts take much longer than I think they should.
5. Three year olds are easily amused with safety scissors, a glue stick and scrap paper.
6. Glue sticks don't make good lip gloss.
7. Nine and a half year olds can be awfully nostalgic when it comes to the 3 weeks they spent in a "real" preschool 7 years ago.
8. Middle sisters like to go first. It doesn't even matter what we're doing - reading time, crafts, a visit with the dr...they just want to be FIRST.
9. Patience is not something I was blessed with.
10. Thank the Lord that I was blessed with an exceedingly patient husband.

We'll be taking Fridays off until we start co op on September 5th, so this ends our first week of school. Next week we'll crack open the My Father's World books and I'll probably lose my mind trying to do 3 different programs each day. Too bad the house isn't self-cleaning. That would be nice....

Math review

Sydney is not that thrilled with math. It's hard for me to comprehend her disdain for the subject because it was always my favorite part of school. Yes, the rumors are true. I did and still do math problems for fun. I never did catch on to calculus, but the rest of it was fabulously interesting and I probably would have become a math teacher if I could have gotten beyond calc 101. But I digress....

So Sydney is not nearly as thrilled with math as I am and it's been a chore for me to figure out ways to make it meaningful and fun for her. We "let" her keep score in card games, she's always the banker when we play Monopoly or Life, she adds up everyone's cards when we play Uno and her sisters' dice when we play Chutes and Ladders. That game moves much quicker with dice, by the way. Remember that when boredom sets in. Anyway, that's all been great and wonderful, but she still gets cranky when we pull out the math book. Being the first week of school after a lengthy vacation, we need to do some review. Today I got even more creative than usual (or stole someone else's idea - it's hard to say which way it happened) and decided she should roll some dice and add or subtract whatever she rolls.

As you can see by the pictures, she was much more excited about rolling the dice than doing the math...but she got the job done and I think she might have had some fun along the way.

First day of school

Today was the official start of our 2008 - 2009 school year and we began the day with photos, of course!

As I mentioned in my last post, I decided to start the year with a study of the Olympics. Today. we talked about the history of the Olympics and some of the symbols and traditions of the games. We learned that the Olympic motto is "Citius - Altius - Fortius" which means "Faster, higher, stronger" and is intended to focus on trying your best - not just winning first place. So we talked about how there are only a little over 300 gold medals to be won and that most of the athletes will come home losers, but that's OK because they will try their best and many will do better than they have ever done before. "Winning isn't everything" seems like a good way to start the school year.

Aside from our Olympic study, Sadey became an official preschooler today and is learning all about the letter A. Delaney and I read some books together and spent a great deal of time looking over the books she'll be using this year. She is most excited about the science books and can't wait to start her nature journal. Sydney did a little bit of math and language arts review and was happy when I told her we'd put her first spelling pre-test off until tomorrow.

All in all, it was a very good day.

How much fun can you have with $1.00?

One of our goals for the summer was to construct and erupt volcanoes. We made them in June (see picture here), but never got around to the big eruption until tonight. It's amazing how much fun you can have with sawdust, glue, rocks, sticks and twigs from the yard, baking soda, vinegar and food coloring.