Oh, What a Wonderful Day

I'm a doer, so when we get a lot accomplished in a day it makes me feel really good.

Today Sean was able to fill out a work plan and work through each task to completion. For those of you who have children who do this naturally, hats off to you! Please, please, know that you are blessed. It took us a few weeks to get to this point.

He is not a person who can start working first thing in the morning, so we structure our day with outside time first, then we come in and work.
We start each day with taking care of our environment, and our pets. He feeds all of the animals, and plays with the dog and loves to pet the chickens. Today was another laundry day. We usually do it on Mondays, but we didn't get all of it finished yesterday.

When we first started on this homeschool journey last month, he would do work, then write down what he did in his work plan. I realized it was not really a great way to set a goal and work toward it. It was more like, do some stuff, then record what I did.

A couple of weeks into school I had him change that pattern. Now he writes his own work plan, and completes what is on it. He has started out slowly. He usually completes three works. I've decided that we will add on work as the year goes. Not that I will tell him to add anything, but I'll do a lesson in something that he hasn't written on his plan yet.

Today he did FOUR works, plus all of those chores of feeding the cats, the dog, and taking care of the chickens, and doing his own laundry.

The one thing I added today was writing. We are beginning to study the structure of a paragraph, so I told him he could write about anything at all that he wanted to write about. That would be our topic.
He chose the new game he is getting in a couple of weeks.

I asked him to tell me what he knows about that game, and as he told me, I wrote it on our small white board. I numbered each sentence. Then he chose which sentence should be first. I told him to imagine he was writing this for his great-grandma, who is 92. She has never played a video game in her life, and knows nothing about them.

He did a great job of choosing the sentences so that they flowed in a nice order.

This exercise was to get him used to brainstorming, and also to help him feel successful.  It took a long time, probably almost an hour. And he felt really great about his work, and made a comment afterward that he worked really hard on it, and he would be upset if that paper somehow got ruined.

He also said they never had time to do that last year. He said they had about 30 minutes to write two paragraphs, and he always felt he didn't have enough time to do it.

I think we'll do this many more times, before I have him start revising and rewriting.

It was such a great day!