Top Ten {Tuesday}: Random Homeschooling Tidbits

Linking up with Many Little Blessings for Top Ten {Tuesday}.

Today I'm sharing a list of homeschooling-related thoughts, including what are days are looking like right now and what we'd like to work on in the future. (Plus some minor griping. Ahem.)

1. We do a lot of art time. Coloring, painting, cutting, gluing, drawing, crafts . . . the Agents are all about the art. (Favorite description ever about children's artwork—and unfortunately I don't know the source—"if you can do it wrong, it's not art.")

2. Gym time is all the time. The Agents exercise . . . a lot. They run. They play outside. They dance. They do jumping jacks in the living room. (Agent J calls them jumping Julias. Can't make this up.) 

Art time, about to get messy

3. I don't worry too much about retention. If we are studying ocean life, we might have 3-5 books on different sea creatures out of the library at any given time. Some we might read once, others half a dozen times. I don't go back and quiz Agent E on what she remembers about manta rays. I find that she naturally can recall quite a bit of what she reads, though, and will often volunteer that information later on. More importantly: She thinks learning about new things is fun.

4. I am still quasi-seriously considering a Little Einsteins semester.

5. I will likely suggest we study the human body as one of our main topics starting in January. Agent E has already indicated that she'd like to study space next. We'll probably do both.

6. We are turning into those hippie crunchy everything is learning homeschoolers I used to mock. (Including in this now rather embarrassing old post.) Sigh.

7. We are all grateful for the ability to move at our own pace when our usual routine doesn't go as planned. (Agent J has an ear infection this week, and Agent A decided it would be a great time to start seeing 6:00 a.m. again.)

Agent A silliness

8. We don't spend nearly as much time on "school" in the traditional sense as we would if E attended the elementary school down the road. Their official "school hours" are 8:30 to 3:00. If she rode the bus, she'd be catching it in the morning at 7:40 and stepping off it in the afternoon around 3:25. That's almost an eight-hour day. And that doesn't even count the fact that she'd be awake 45 minutes to an hour before she had to leave each day and likely doing homework after school each day for . . . another 30 minutes? Another hour? That's also not accounting for any other activities (see #10). She is six. I am the only one who finds this insane?

9. I see a post about my overall frustration with the education system in the United States coming soon.

10. I'm in no hurry to push them into organized "social" activities so we can check the "S" word off our list. As of right now, we don't do any, which I think makes us kind of an anomaly. This will probably change soon . . . maybe after Christmas. Likely just one thing the girls can do together, perhaps a beginning gymnastics class. But I'm not in rush and neither are they.

Thanks for reading and have a blessed day.