a day in the life

If  you are visiting from Simple Homeschool's A Day in the Life week, hi and welcome. My name is Carrie and my husband and I have two little boys, ages 6 and 2. This is our second semester homeschooling. Most often, you can find me at jamesrivergirl...and her boys.

The following gives a glimpse of what an ordinary day looks like for us. Because I'm not really a time-managing kind of girl, I haven't specified times, but rather blocks of time: Morning, Afternoon, Late Afternoon, and Evening.

Morning
Breakfast with Daddy (literally, I'm still in bed asleep while Brandon has breakfast with the boys.)
Jump and crawl on Momma and snuggle with parents until Daddy says we need to have family prayer and then leaves for the day.
The boys watch PBS while I very reluctantly leave my bed.

Once I'm up, I have breakfast,
often sitting beside Luke while he does his

Piano practice.

Sometimes we look at a To Do list for the day, but not usually.

Jobs - usually with help, between 1 and 3 jobs I want Luke to do while Pete tags along and helps...sometimes.

Playtime (Often while I do my own jobs and "The Essentials" - personal prayer and scripture reading )

This morning playtime could include: running errands, visiting the library, getting together with friends, playing at the park, a morning walk/bike ride, making up tunes on the piano, looking at books, or listening to books on tape, listening to Johnny Cash or Coldplay, Music and Movement time with me, writing or drawing-sometimes with me, baking with me, Creative time (with paper, scissors, glue, tape, and markers, crayons, paints, play-doh, etc.), and playing outside with bikes, scooters, shovels, balls, and bags to collect pecans. 


I would also like this time, or late afternoon to include serving others, but we haven't started yet.

Storytime and Lunch
Usually, we have story time first, reading about 6 storybooks together on the couch and then the boys sit at the table and demand "honey!" or "jam!" while I make lunch. Also, generally we have storytime a little bit after 12 noon and Pete goes down for his nap after 1 o'clock. He usually sleeps a couple of hours.

Afternoon
Pete's Nap.
While Pete sleeps:
Reading time with Luke, including longer storybooks, novels, chapter books, science books, etc. And sometimes we do more directed learning with phonics, but mostly he gets that with all of his drawings that he wants help labeling.
Math time: Singapore and made up word problems by me.
Science: currently we're learning about the Human Body mostly through books, but we'll do other more hands-on types of things too. After Human Body, we want to learn about trees and plants and then ocean and water.
Independent time: write and draw, ride bike, dig and play outside, legos, Dado squares, blocks, trains, cars, PBS kids online games, or play on the Friend LDS.org site, etc. Also, I find movies to stream from Netflix for him to watch about all sorts of things: dolphins, weather, coral reefs, the human body...
(I spend independent time reading or doing laundry or making lists and planning. And this is when I read blogs, check email. If I haven't already showered when the boys were watching pbs in the morning, this is when I do that. And sometimes I start dinner.)

Late Afternoon
Pete wakes up.
Then the boys play together again. Or we get together with a friend. Or we have piano lessons. We'll be starting soccer and another PE class soon. And on some afternoons we invite others over for special story times with accompanying activities.

Make dinner while boys play with next door neighbors who are home from school now.

Evening
Daddy comes home, plays with boys, helps with dinner, and/or picks up the front room.
Family Dinner. (If we remember this is also when we read scriptures as a family, but only one page each night.)
Sometimes do dishes, sometimes leave them for tomorrow. (Often, Luke is back at his desk, drawing a picture to slip under one of our pillows around this time of day.)
Read to boys, help them get ready for bed. (Most often Brandon does this while I either clean up the kitchen or hole up in our bedroom alone.)
Family prayer.
Little boys go to bed.

Daily

I started out with one routine, then when that routine wasn't working, we had no routine for a while. I've spent a lot of time thinking about what I want our days to look like, and I don't think our normal schedule yet reflects what I'd like our days to be. But in order to both feel that Luke is accomplishing things, and feel that we are not spending time fighting about it, Luke and I had a good conversation cross-legged on my bed one morning. I explained that everyone is important to somebody, and important people have responsibilities. I must have repeated that ten times in the course of the conversation, "Important people have responsibilities." Then Luke told me what he thinks some of his responsibilities are, and I contributed some ideas, too. He wrote them all down on a piece of paper as we discussed. I have a photo of that picture, but I'll post it later.

Luke's daily responsibilities are as follows:

Reading time - when we sit together and I read aloud to him.
Writing time - Variable, sometimes independent, sometimes with me, when he draws pictures, and uses creative spelling to label things in them, or when he asks me how to spell various words and he lists them on a page, when he "writes" stories, or draws pictures and dictates stories to me.
Piano practice - Luke started lessons this fall.
Brush teeth.
Putting away things when he's finished with them. (We're making progress, but it doesn't come naturally to me either. If he doesn't put things away, then this responsibility changes to be "help clean room--a big job.")
Chore - 1 or 2 jobs that Momma needs him to do, Momma chooses.

We have some changes coming to our weekly schedule. I'll post about that soon.

Also, I just need to say that we were not fighting about reading or writing ever. But the picking up toys and other jobs can be contentious at our house.