This week, we will spend one day at Classical Conversations, one morning at the dentist, one afternoon celebrating beautiful things with our Charlotte Mason friends, and a morning at programming and electronics. I honestly don’t know if we can do it all, but all this stuff doesn’t usually happen on the same week. We’ll do our best.
Rejoice: I will be starting my early mornings with scripture, writing morning pages, and often a walk with my neighbor.
Relate: We’ll cook, clean and eat together several times a day, and apparently there will be plenty of time for conversations and audiobooks in the car.
Remember: We are aiming for reviewing our memory work four days this week. I have one kid who needs to memorize a paragraph from the Declaration of Independence, and two kids planning to recite Hilaire Belloc’s “Rebecca who Slammed Doors and Perished Miserably” next week in class. We have all been assigned to memorize the first few lines of the Lord’s Prayer in Spanish. One kid has a new violin piece to learn and needs to be familiar with the first Chorus speech in Henry V, and one needs to learn all of the songs from Lion King Jr.
Reason: We plan four days of math and four days of grammar (English or Latin depending on the student). One also has homework for his electronics and JavaScript classes.
Read: We’ll read about an hour a day silently, broken into chunks. That will include reading the assigned ready for the older kid and free reading for the younger boys. We’ll aim for most of our ongoing read alouds. We’ll read bits of The World of Captain John Smith, Wild Animals I Have Known, Pilgrim’s Progress, Plutarch’s Publicola, Trial and Triumph, and Treasure Island. (Short lessons mean that we’ll be spending 15-20 minutes on each of those, so that list isn’t as long as it seems like.)
Record: The younger boys will do copywork and and IEW lesson. The older guy has an essay to write on The Scarlet Letter, and we all need to add to timelines and such.
Restore: The beautiful things we’ll look in this week include Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony and Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait. For me, this will include reading and teaching Latin to some moms. I will also be intentional about being home most evenings. For my boys, this means having free time after lunch (for the younger boys) and in the late afternoon and evening (for the big kid). It will mean going to bed on time.
It is going to be a crazy week…. the second one in a row. Next week, we have more margin, and I am grateful for that.