Settling into a routine....

Now that I have got most of my o/s work done, I spend most of my days at home with Claire and we're finally settling down into a routine of sorts. I'm not the world's greatest organizer, so this is kind of an achievement for me.

Every morning, the Husband ferries us to my mum's at about 7, and my mum then helps me get Claire ready for school. We would then leave the house for school at about 8.15 - 8.20, since school is a 10-minute walk away. The next 3 hours are my daily me-time: I have my breakfast after I drop her off, then do some surfing / catch up on reading before preparing Claire's home-schooling resources. Currently, besides her kumon workbooks and her ICL homework, we make use of materials from the following sites:

1. http://www.homeschoolshare.com/Lapbooks_at_HSS.php
2. http://www.enchantedlearning.com

plus ideas I garner from early childhood learning resources borrowed from our good 'ole NLB. And can I just say, homeschooling a child is HARD! Kudos to the mums who do it full-time - I don't know how they manage.

At 11.20, it's off to fetch Claire home. We've been squabbling on the way back because she'd want to do various activities, including going to the library (which is right next to her school), buying sweets from 7-11 (which I let her do once and now heartily regret), and stopping at the playground (see previous post). The first day I fetched her from school, we went to the library and my mum kept nagging at me about how I need to continue her routine of going straight home after school. At that time I thought my mum was making a mountain out of a molehill again, but after one, two weeks of squabbling, I've seen the light. :P At least now after I've stood firm over the sweets issue, today Claire went meekly past the 7-11 with only a slight lingering glance at it, and there were also no calls for the library.

When we reach home, Claire eats a small bowl of fruits before taking her lunch. I've really got to admire my mum about this - I think Claire eats a really, really healthy lunch, and I feel quite guilty for not having the discipline to continue this on weekends as well. Lunch is either porridge with fish and veggies, or pasta soup (on the one day a week when she has porridge for morning snack in school). Claire actually asks for porridge sometimes during the weekends as well, but if I do make her lunch, it is usually pasta soup, which is easier to prepare.

After lunch, Claire watches TV for a while, and starts her homeschooling at 2 plus to 3. She does 2 pages of Kumon, 1 exercise from the Brain Quest workbook, and then we will work on a couple of activities for her lapbook. Unfortunately I am still struggling with the lapbook thing - choosing the theme and activity is really challenging! - and I haven't settled into a schedule with it yet, so lapbooking is a little haphazard for us at the moment. We also sometimes do some reading when our lapbook is story-based. I try to keep our homeschooling activities to about 1, 1.5 hours a day, but depending on her mood and physical state, we sometimes do less. I find it pointless to force her through if she is really tired.

Claire then eats half a steamed apple (my mum swears by this as a remedy for strong lungs / prevention of asthma - it's got its roots in Chinese medicine) before eating dinner, while I wait to go home for dinner with the Husband.

In the evenings at home, we try to do some reading if I can remember - oops! I've got to be more diligent about this. We've recently picked up her Peter and Jane again, and I was pleasantly surprised when she got through 1a and 1b within 2 days. We previously laboured very long over about 1/4 of 1a before I gave it up as a lost cause, about a year ago. When it comes to readers, there are many opinions out there about which are the best. For Claire, I find that she is still picking up reading better via sight/key word reading, though, through her ICL classes, she is becoming more sensitive to phonics. Eventually she will come to depend on phonics, I hope, as I think most hard English words are phonetic, and phonics really helps in spelling, but at the moment, she is doing very well with her Peter and Jane and seems to be very interested. One of the great mysteries I have not yet managed to figure out - why do children like Peter and Jane so much? It is like one of the most boring series ever! But oh well, it works. And lest I forget, I am also a product of Peter and Jane reading. heheheh

I also have the Clifford phonics packs, so I dug them out last night for her to read again, but she was more interested in me reading them to her, than reading them herself. For some reason she is just more motivated by P and J.

Occasionally we manage to read some Sage Formula too - I find this series really good for Chinese. It works on a similar concept as P and J (read - boring as h*ll!) but again, hey, it works very well. And I know she is not just memorizing the text on her books as she used to do for English books, but she is recognizing words, which is what she should be doing. I will try to combine this with 四五快读 methodology - when I finally get my lazy self to read the series!

I make it a point to read a bedtime story to her every night, but all this while I've been reading just English books, so I'm going to try to make Tuesdays and Thursdays at least, Chinese story day. I can read individual Chinese words pretty well, but it takes me longer to digest and comprehend the sentences, compared to English, so I usually take the easy way out. :P But if I want to encourage Claire to read Chinese books, then I should show her that I do read them too, right?

Another goal is to adjust her sleeping hours to something more respectable for a 4-year-old. I know that she goes to bed at very disgraceful hours, and now that I have the time I should just dig in my horns and get her used to going to bed early, starting with - by 10pm first. :P Yup, that's how bad it is, and the worst part is, she doesn't nap in the afternoons. She has been going to bed on time the last couple of nights, so let's hope she keeps this up.