A New Path to Follow: Week in Review: Week 7 September 15-19

Sunday, September 21, 2014

I'm not going to lie, this week was a tough week. The boys were giving me a hard time and by Wednesday I was feeling like a complete failure. I was losing my patience at the silliest things and I felt like the boys were being rude and disrespectful to me. I gave up halfway through our school day on Wednesday because we all had such bad attitudes and I knew that any real learning was not going to happen. Here is what I think has happened: we were all getting burned out!

The boys have completed 6 full weeks of school without one day off. They do not have "traditional" school on the weekends, but we do expect them to correct their math from the week, read, and practice their piano on the weekends. If we do not complete all of our work for the week, we will finish it up on Saturday mornings

I have been working like crazy, besides teaching my boys all day. I tutor 4 weeknights, including Friday night and also most of the day on Sunday. So, the only day I get off is on Saturday and I am usually planning lessons for my boys and my 8 kids that I tutor. I am also trying to run the boys to their 9 different activities during the week. (This is between all 3 of them, they each don't have 9 activities!)

I think after 7 weeks of running at this crazy pace, we had had enough. So, we didn't accomplish a lot of the extra or fun activities that I had planned for the week. We did manage to get 4 days completed this week though. We are just going to extend our FIAR book to next week. That is also one thing I am going to change. We are going to cover our FIAR & BFIAR books over two weeks. We have so many things that I try and cover while reading those books and I feel like I am rushing through them or never getting to the activities. So, we are going to slow down with those. I am also going to be having more unstructured time to see if that helps the boys feel more relaxed through the day. I think I may have been expecting too much out of them and forgetting that they are still little. I don't want to squash that love of learning!

We did manage to redeem our week with a fun "Staycation" in the city. And we will try and have a much better week 8! I will just leave you with some pictures from the week and we will get back to our regular review next week.