Homeschooling When It Feels Like the Clock is Ticking

It's amazing how often, out of no where, I start feel such pressure on this homeschooling journey.

It feels like time is flying by and that we aren't going enough.  I often feel as though time is running out and we need to do more, do better, and work faster.

I woke in the middle of the night thinking that if my boys had to go back to public school they'd probably be behind since here it is, more than 1/2 way through the year and we've really only worked on some basic addition, subtraction and multiplication skills.

Seems like time just flies right by so fast, there's just never enough of it.
By the time I woke this morning that thought had almost passed completely but not quite.  I actually mentioned this to the boys and they pointed out each other's skills to me!

• Evan, who would have been in Pre- Kindergarten this year is reading and doing basic addition. 
•  Alec, who would have been in 1st grade this year is working with all 2nd grade books.  
• Ian, who would have been in 3rd grade has skills that range all over the place.  When asked to divide the batch of Pokemon cards yesterday morning he knew that we couldn't evenly divide 40 by 3 but that 39 could be and quickly figured out that they could each have 13 cards.  That's pretty complicated division for a 3rd grader. 

 All of their arguments helped me to feel calm and reaffirm, once again, our decision to home school.

With a feeling of calm, we decided to dive into the day's work.
We read a few more of our Arctic poems at breakfast and I asked each of the older boys to find a favorite and copy it into their journals.

While they worked Ian gave a fairly detailed summary to his brothers about the Diary of the Wimpy Kid book that he's been reading.   He uses a book light and now reads in bed every night for 15-20 minutes (willingly!!).  So far his new love of reading (that I talked about in yesterday's post) is holding strong and I'm so pleased! 
  
Once they finished their copy work I printed out a new math game for the older two boys to play together.  Ironically it's called Time is Running Out and it's a very simple game played much like Old Maid.  There are analog and digital times printed on squares that they have to match and the one stuck with the dead battery at the end looses.  Both of them quickly caught on and seemed to have fun playing; they asked to play twice!

While they played their game, Evan read from his Bob Books and did a quick dot- to- dot sheet and then I declared us done for the day since we were having company and I wanted to clean and get food ready.

The most important thing to do when it feels like time is running out is just to keep putting one foot in front of the other and focus on those skills they do know, what skills they MUST know, and remember that learning is a life long process.