A tale of two mornings... or you just never know what you'll get

As I have mentioned, we began our official school yesterday morning making today our second day. Not much has changed about our morning, so people pretty easily fell back into the rhythm. The biggest difference is that they each have a list of things they are required to do on their own with a calendar to keep track of those things. We'll see how it it goes. The first year doing this is always a little rocky. But back to how the actual mornings went.

Yesterday, everyone was up and ready to go with animal chores completed (including myself). We got through everything on my list with no problem, and in general, things went smoothly. Except... the whole morning felt much like a comedian must feel when the house never laughs. Everyone was at the table, but the level of engagement was low to non-existent. On the other hand, no one complained about what was going to be required of them, either. I'll admit it did feel a little disheartening and in my 26 years of homeschooling this was a first. Usually I can count on at least the first day everyone being enthusiastic. Since I had to be on Zoom at 12:30 and the rest of the afternoon was booked, I didn't have much time to dwell on it. 

So this morning, I was not quite sure what to expect and tried to adjust my expectations accordingly. This proved to be unnecessary as today was totally different. Everyone was engaged and being their amusing selves. Even grammar went better. While there were the usual complaints about learning grammar and diagramming, being engaged does help in understanding. I was asked if anyone was able to save their life by knowing how to diagram a sentence. I suggested they write a story about how knowing sentence diagramming proved life saving, though I'm pretty sure that I will never be presented with such. A start was made on understanding independent and dependent clauses. 

The most amusing part of the morning involved vegetables. As part of our botany study this year I am beginning the school day several times a week reading from a book called, Fifty Plants that Changed the Course of History by Bill Laws. Today's reading was about onions. In the course of reading, we learned that onions, along with peas, lettuce, and leeks, were among some of the most ancient vegetables. Then I heard from L., seated next to me, "Ahhh.... the elder vegetables." L. has pretty decent comedic timing, and it just struck me as funny. Everyone had to pause in the story of the onion while I regained my composure. I then suggested that I would love to read a story about the Elder Vegetables. This I might actually get to read. (I suggest a lot of stories based on discussions. I don't get to read a lot of stories.) We've all been laughing about the Elder Vegetables throughout the day.

H. joins in with us when she can. She is working on a Draw the World book like everyone else. She listens to all that I read, but does not participate in the grammar lesson. She has math that she is continuing to progress in. Last spring she learned to carry and we are not setting the ground work for borrowing. And H. draws. She loves to draw and color and she does a lot of it. I am so impressed with what she is creating these days. For instance, these two pictures she drew over the weekend.

I love the three dimensionality of them. They are both drawn from actual items around our house. For instance, here is the actual pitcher she drew.

I'm fascinated how she took the idea of the pitcher and then made it her own, not feeling the need to copy it exactly. She continually blows me away with what she can do.

R. has had two good mornings. This is lovely because she has had some not good nights and today a not good late afternoon. (I am reminded that historically the month of October has been fairly dire and we seem to be in a lead up to that once again.) So, I'll appreciate the good mornings. Yesterday, we did a little work with numbers and she was able to count items up to five. My window for working on this with her is about five minutes. After that she gets overwhelmed and starts just spewing whatever numbers happen to pop into her head. Today we worked on the letter "A". She was able to hold the name of the letter in her head, being able to tell me its name each time I asked. This alone is a step ahead of where we were last year. I also got out my big bin of metal letters and asked her to find all the A's that she could. Happily, she did a great job finding the upper case A's, the lower case a's proved to be a bit trickier. I'll take our success where we find it, though.

Her other small success was yesterday afternoon. As I mentioned, I was on Zoom for a good chunk of the time and had gotten out a play dough birthday party activity for her. It had the dough, some cookie cutters, and decorations for decorating the birthday cookies created out of the dough. H. actually really like this and will play with her, but H. was involved in her own projects yesterday afternoon. The other difficulty was that R. will get stuck on two or three activities, will do them for hours if I don't intervene, and not want to do anything else. "Not want to" doesn't quite describe it. It is more like absolutely refuses to entertain even the vaguest notion of other activities, continuing to perseverate on her activities of choice. I work very hard to keep rotating what she does because it is so easy for her brain to get stuck. The birthday play dough set was not on her radar when I got it out, and she had already told me that she would not be playing with it. I was late, so told her that was fine, but we weren't getting out the perseveration toy of choice while I was in my meeting and flew upstairs. I knew someone would come get me if a problem developed. 

It was only in the last five minutes of my meeting that R. comes into my room, so she lasted a good two and a half hours downstairs. When I went downstairs, she proudly showed me this.

I'm afraid my first questions were, "Did you do this yourself?" and "Was H. playing with you?" Yes, she did it herself, and no, H. was not playing with her. It is very rare for her to be flexible enough to play with something that isn't a stuck item, so this thrilled me. Baby steps, baby steps eventually get you somewhere. Now, if we can just sleep until the alarm goes off in the morning, that would be fantastic.