idling

Hey, look what's happening at our house today! Yup, you guessed it, an ice storm. I know, I know, just shocking isn't it. Once upon a time we used to get SNOW storms in February, but courtesy of global warming, ice now fills our lives in the winter.

Lying in bed this morning (long past when I should have been OUT of bed), and realizing that it was the first day of February, I thought about the pace of our homeschooling (and lives) during the past month. To say it was a slow pace is somewhat of an exaggeration. We just plain and simple had our engines in idle. Two of the four weeks boasted no organized curriculum plan at all (this week being one of them), the other two weeks an extremely relaxed version of our usual lesson plans. I realized where we were headed before even beginning this week, and decided to go ahead and call this a "vacation week". Or reorganization week. Or meditate-and-search-for-motivation week. In any case, I had planned to take a couple weeks off in March, but it had become glaringly clear that I needed it NOW. In fact, given the general yearly rhythm of our household, I'm seriously considering scheduling the entire month of January off next year.

Here's what my bed looked like most of this week, as I played solitaire with my curriculum materials, shifting piles of movement activities onto stories that seemed to support basic themes, moving this craft to that pile because it looked like a better fit. Eventually, I put everything away where it belonged in the original package, and started over from scratch. That's not a bad thing -- it means that my kids have shifted in their needs enough that what I THOUGHT we'd be working on now (back when I came up with our curriculum plan at the start of our Winter Semester) no longer fits their needs. So the whole darned thing needed to be ravamped, something that just wasn't possible during the course of a "normal" homeschooling week.

In anticipation of a week of idling, I decided to upgrade our music access system. Up until this point, we've been listening to music and stories on tape on a vastly outdated, immensly inadequate boom box, which required the kids to hold stock still in order not to cause a skip on the CD. It seemed insane to be playing peppy, exercise-inducing music while the kids clung to a nearby chair to prevent themselves from moving to the beat of it. So, thanks to a very patient, technologically-proficient young man at the electronics store, we stepped into the 21st century and bought an iPod and a speaker base for it, and thanks to some tolerant friends (who I don't think screamed with each email from me), I actually managed to figure out how to upload (download?) the kids' music CDs onto it. Here's Zoo Boy dancing in the living room this week, in sheer delight of being able to MOVE to the music finally. Occassionally they forget, and I find them huddled in the chair, afraid to breath. But with frequent gentle reminders that they CAN get up and dance, they are slowly adjusting to the freedom to shake it whenever they want to.

J has spent a good part of the week running various experiments (like this one, where he's using a magnifying glass to see if he can make his smallest Matroyshka doll look as big as the biggest). Like The Map Man said, everything is an experiment to J. Which is beyond cool, considering that just a few short years ago, he didn't have the capacity to wonder about things. He wonders plenty now! An oft heard phrase around here these days is "I wonder what would happen if...."

Which is the best part about idling. Despite doing nothing that even resembles organization, a week (or two, or four) of idling really give the kids the freedom to explore the possibilities and answer their "I wonders" to the fullest extent.

However, as great as all that is, it's time to kick ourselves back into a higher gear. February is here, winter will be gone before we know it, and there's still some unexplored corners of our winter universe that I want to introduce them to. So next week, it's back to a more structured day for us!