oh, no. she's blogging again.

i promise not to blog every day for the duration of the summer.  i don't really know what's gotten into me the past week that made me blog so much.  i think i've just had a lot to get out, and by golly, i've got a designated place to sort through my thoughts with the assumption that people actually care what i'm saying.  it's called a blog.

moving on.  today was the first day of doing school with all three kids. 

i should probably explain how we do things around here before i go into much more detail.  we have two sections to our school day.  the first is "computer school."  the website-that-shall-not-be-named is responsible for this.  it has tons of links to other websites, games, printables, online tests, videos, etc, all grouped together according to grade level and subject, which are then helpfully sorted into 36 lessons to be used over the course of the school year.  i go through each week and choose what we'll do every day (and we never do everything they have for us, there's just so much they have listed). 

up till this point, i've only been doing beau's grade level, and the other kids generally hang around and listen/watch videos/help with answering questions/etc.  sometimes i'll rephrase things so the littlest one can understand something better. 

"computer school" generally takes about half an hour to an hour, depending on what we're doing that day.  sometimes we just read.  sometimes we talk more than we read.  sometimes there are games.  sometimes there's a video.  it varies.

then there's worksheets.  everyone has been doing their own worksheets for almost a year now.  that's nothing new.  nothing much has changed except for the volume of worksheets.  worksheets usually take two to three hours, and i'm not even kidding.  this is including five-minute breaks every fifteen minutes. 

the point of me saying all of that was to explain what i meant when i say xander and bella have their own history and science now.  history and science fall under the category of "computer school."  so all that really means for me is about 30-45 more minutes in front of the computer during school time, and about two more hours in front of it on my own during the week to lesson plan.

more work for me, is what i'm saying.  but more work in the right place - lesson planning - and not in the wrong place - making our "school day" super-de-duper long. 

so it went smoothly this morning.  bella was upset we didn't do more school.  she actually cried. 

God help me.