My Brain Is Full

I haven't written about homeschooling for awhile. So here goes... We're just beyond the halfway point in most of our subjects. My son is cruising through spelling, literature, language skills, and history. We slow down a little bit with math and science. We're playing catch up with music and art.

Actually, we're mostly skipping over the music curriculum. At the start of the year, we learned about things like instruments, rhythm and pitch, but then the lessons focused on singing. My son does not want to learn to sing. He'll sing in the shower, or when he's playing, but he doesn't want to sit there and formally vocalize to me. So we started skipping over lessons. I figure if he wants to take vocal lessons some day, that will be his choice. This summer he'll be introduced to informal piano lessons. That might be more fun for him.

I've said it before, but one of my favorite things about homeschooling is flexibility. I am always aware of how my son is learning so that I can change the lesson plan to match his needs. Sometimes I have to be like a quarterback who calls a new play at the line of scrimmage.

Yesterday morning, the first thing we started on was a simple math review of the 9 times table. My son put his head on the desk and said, "My brain is full." I asked, "How can it be full when we haven't learned anything yet?" He replied, "I don't know. It just is."

So I told him that if he couldn't focus then he should go up to his room and take a nap. And he did just that. At 9:00 in the morning. He actually crawled into bed and slept until 11.

He can't do that every day, but this one time the flexibility of the homeschooling situation allowed for a better learning environment later on that day. He was refreshed enough to do lessons until 6 o'clock last night!

Today everything was back to normal. School starts at 9am, break around 10:30, lunch at 11:45, school again from 1 until around 3.

Regular schedules are good, but a regular schedule with flexibility is even better!