This week the hubs is home, and to be honest, his presence here is throwing me off. At this point I'm still not super confident in my teaching methods, and we're still in the discovery phase of how to teach, so having him here makes me uncomfortable.
That being said, things are going pretty well. The stress level is much MUCH lower than it had been while M was in public school, both for him and me. While there's still stress, it's a different kind of stress.
The other thing that's happening this week is I'm trying to get ready for a 3-day show that I do twice yearly at the State Farmers Market here in Raleigh. I make chain maille jewelry with bicycle parts, and sell it at a few craft shows, online (click here, and in a few stores around the country. I think getting ready for the show is stressing me more than anything else. Well, that, and I have to get a ton of jewelry ready to send to one of my other stores.
Anywho, yesterday M and I tried something different. We started the morning off by going to the gym so I could do a short workout there while he hung out in the childcare center. When that was done, we came home and he decided to try making tipis out of paper clips and tape. It actually worked out pretty well.
Over the weekend I spent some time thinking about different ways of teaching him that don't involve him sitting on his butt at the kitchen table with me. Though that's my preferred method because I'm lazy :P, it's not the way he learns <b>and retains</b> information best. He needs to move and be taught at the same time.
So yesterday I decided to shake things up a bit. Once he was done with the tipis, I directed him to the living room where he could choose from a couple of positions in which to do his work: 1)sitting in a bean bag chair or 2)laying on the floor on his stomach with his elbows propping him up. He chose to sit in the bean bag chair and work. And he worked beautifully there, completely 4 writing worksheets on the Pueblo people. Once I went through his answers, though, things weren't so wonderful for a little while. Some of his answers were nonsensical and incomplete, so we had to find a good way to go through them and get them answered properly. I ended up scribing for him a bit, which was fine. But he was getting agitated and tired, so it was time for a break.
After his break, I was getting agitated with all the noise from hubs completing work on the bathroom, so I grabbed the book M was working in, and M too, and we went outside for a walk. My plan was to get better answers from him on the worksheets he'd been doing before, so while we were walking we also talked. It worked for the most part. There were still things that distracted him, but it was still fun, and he definitely enjoyed it. We probably walked about a mile.
When we got back it was lunch time, so he went and fixed his lunch, then did a few worksheets (who's/whose, their/there/they're). He finished his kachina and worked more on the tipis, then started on Khan Academy. He got really frustrated with it and refused to watch the videos on KA that will help him through the lessons. That's something we're going to have to work on...I'm not that great at some parts of Math, and I'd planned on him using KA for those things.
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Today has been better. I've had to run a couple of errands, and he did exactly what I asked him to do while he was here with hubs. He's also moving pretty fast today, which is nice, because he'll have lots of time to play and I'll have time to work on getting stuff ready for the show, in addition to the last appointment I have today.
I must say, when he's motivated, he can really knock out assignments. I think he's motivated by being done early today because he pushed right through a writing pre-planning assignment I'd given him, and he's now working on his last piece of Math for the day.
I wish I knew why some days he is so motivated and some days, no matter what is offered as motivation, he isn't. I guess everyone is like that, but it's more noticeable with him. His highs and lows are higher and lower than most...
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