r-e-s-p-o-n-s-i-b-i-l-i-t-y

I have just recently started to homeschool the Banimal and a friend loaned me a really neat little curriculum called Five in a Row. It takes children's library books and makes at least a weeks worth of lessons out of them. The first one I am going to do is called Katy and the big Snow.

Okay.... by this point you are probably wondering what this has to do with responsibility. Well, the theme of Katy and the big Snow is that Katy finally gets an opportunity to work and fulfill her responsibilities. As I was preparing the lessons and deciding how I would go about everything I realized that I should really get a concrete definition of what responsibility means. We use the word often with our boys, but I don't know that I have ever explained it to them.

I just couldn't come up with a defintion that I liked so I ended up lookiing it up in a dictionary. And then I had a blast from the past. I spent nearly every night in the 6th grade writing the word 'responsibility'. I had a teacher that would make the whole class write the word 500 times every time someone in class misbehaved.

I remember alot of writer's cramp that year.... but here is the sad part. I probably wrote that word over 10, 000 times in her class, but in a year's time she never took the time to fully explain what it means. We left knowing how to spell a word... which is great... but we had no clue what those letters stood for. Looking back, it seems like her time would have been better spent trying to help us to understand what true responsibility really meant.... personally, socially, corperately....

It seems like in our world there are way too many people that can spell it, but don't understand what it means.

learning to read

I started 'officially' teaching the Banimal to read this morning. Scary thought. He has been asking me for a while and I told him he had to learn his letters and the sounds first. He accomplished that, so I went and bought the book I had decided to use.

Who would think that something that you learn to do in kindergarten could be that scary for me to teach. But I just keep thinking that everything he will do in his academic career will be built on this foundation. I hope that I don't let him down. But... after I thought it thru I calmed down a little. Most of the greatest minds were taught to read by their mothers and fathers who had little to no education themselves. So with that thought I embarked on this journey.

I was pretty uneventful this morning when I did his first lesson. He breezed thru it and I only had to correct him once. Even Pteradactyl boy jumped in and did the lesson with us. He is still working on recognizing his letters, but he got the hang of m and s as quickly as the Banimal. Who knows, maybe I'll kill two birds with one stone... so to speak. He may pick up alot as I teach the Banimal. That's the way its been with most everything else.

I was surprised at how well the adapted to the new schedule I came up with. But I did make it with them in mind. We do a 'sitting at the table being still activity' like learning to read followed by a 'moving around one' like playing games or doing chores. I think with both of them being so young still I would be shooting myself in the foot to do anything that required more than 15-20 mins of sitting still. I noticed the reading lesson took about 15 mins and towards the end they were fidgety.

Well, one day down..... thousands more to go.