recess comes first

2 in 1 day. wowsers.

its been a tad difficult to begin homeschool. first off, I started it late. oops.
I didn't feel bad at first because Hawaii begins soooooo early. but now that I've started, I've realize that a goal within homeschooling is to finish when the kids attending an actual school finish.
duh, right? so we're doing 2 lessons in 1 day. it still doesn't take too long, and luckily, the first part of any grade is the review time of the previous grade. Samuel is simply kickin' its butt! he's awesome. and if we can keep at 2 lessons per day, then in theory, we'll finish early. right? in theory, anyway.

secondly, homeschool is just plain frustrating to start. once you get through the process of choosing a curriculum (which is a HUGE chore within itself) comes the time to actually doing it. I am using Abeka's 1st grade curriculum, and they have the lessons all planned out day by day. I'm not so much a go-with-the-flow type person with this type of stuff, but now that we are finding a groove, that is coming much easier.
I can now see how and why someone would start and then quit. up until this point, it really hasn't been fun ... but we're not quitters over here!

the biggest revelation to finding this groove is = RECESS.
boys are physical. period. Samuel is the one "in school," however, because its homeschool, Elliott is "in" too. he just doesn't know it.
in my perfect world, we'd get up in the morning, have our breakfast, and get right to our schoolwork. that way we could have the rest of the day to do ... whatever. we could be done by 11am if we were focused, and that's what I would strive for ... which is why it was so frustrating. it never worked out.
that perfect world is in my head, its not a real place.
isn't it funny [or some days, not-so-funny] how children wake up, INSTANTLY ready to go? their energy levels are INSTANTLY high. they don't usually need that wake up time you and I do ... or at least I do. they just have an on/off switch, and nothing else.
it can't be just my kid ... tell me its not just my kid!
I had to integrate that "whatever" time first thing in the morning, rather than later in the day. that's the beauty of homeschool, right? that I can do just that. so now, we do recess first thing to get some of that excess energy out.
today we went swimming for an hour & a half, came home, had a snack, and focus for schoolwork was instantly there. it was magical.

coincidentally, I read this article today.

I've committed to doing 1st grade at home. after that, we'll re-evaluate. I make no promises, but, so far so good.