Grasshopper New Media Presents...

We’re on week three of our homeschooling extravaganza, but we’ve chosen to take this week off. (By “we” I totally mean “me.”) Eeyore is attending Vacation Bible School for almost 3 hours every morning, so I thought I would use this time to plan my first ever unit study. This is a big thing for me, not just because its my first unit study, but because I ordered a complete “school-in-a-box” for our first year and so I really haven’t done ANY planning of my own yet. I NEED this week, people. I need it badly.

And so I’m sure you can imagine how frustrated I’ve been when my son, normally the most well-behaved child you could hope to meet, chose this week to begin acting like a jerk. Add Cindy-Lu Hoo (his little sister) to the mix and I haven’t got much work done in the unit study department. Mostly because I have to sit on my hands to keep from hurting the little children. And its hard to prepare a unit study without the use of hands. I’m sure some people could do it. I am not one of those people.

Rather than just sit and glare at the evil being that has taken over my child, I have been trying to figure out exactly what is going on with him. And, by George, I think I’ve got it.

He misses homeschooling.

I know. It sounds a little far-fetched, but bear with me here.

For the last two years he was in public school for six to seven hours a day. And then he wasn’t. He was at home with his family, doing what he used to do in school, but with his mom sitting next to him, her undivided attention focused on him, helping him, reading to him, working with him. Of course he enjoyed that. What child doesn’t love to have full control of their parent’s attention for any length of time.

And after two weeks of enjoying all this attention, I switch it up and ship him off to VBS for the mornings and let him play with friends or on his own in the afternoons. There is minimal one on one time between the two of us. Sure, we eat dinner together, play toys together for a bit here and there, go to the park, but we aren’t connecting in the same way we do when we are doing school. Its different and he misses it.

So do I.

I’m sure we’ll welcome the breaks after we’ve been doing this for longer, but at this point it is still so new to us and we’re both excited about it. I hope we never lose the enthusiasm for learning and teaching that we have now.

[tags]kids, parents, home schooling, vacation break, relationships, mom, son, learning[/tags]
Photo graciously provided by Jasmic, through a Creative Commons license, some rights reserved