Jo's Story

Here is our typical day:

Kadin is up at 5 am spends his time copying birds out of the bird books until 7am.

Emma wakes at 6 am and does her Bible reading then gets on with her seat work - math, handwriting, spelling, Afrikaans, Zulu, language and Bible memory verse.

My Hubby wakes me at 7am when he goes to work. Nate wakes with me at 7am.

We then have breakfast and Bible time from 7:30 - 8:15 a.m.

8:15 - 9am Emma carries on with her work I explain her maths and language to her briefly and then she continues on her own.

Kadin and I do 10 min handwriting (which he then tries to implement whilst labelling all his bird pictures), 10 min Miquon Maths and then we've been working through an alphabet poem that is linked to South Africa so it’s been a great spring board for discussion.

Nate plays under the table, eats the crayons or chalk, pulls papers off the table, build blocks, unpacks the washing basket, plays in the dogs water etc... until someone leaves the back door open and then he's heading to play in the mud until we find him.

Between 9 and 10am the activities are very loose - Kadin plays with his brother and the dog, he jumps off the beanbags and pretends to be all sorts of birds (my 10am my ears are ringing with their calls) when he tires of this he'll ask to watch a bird or National geographic video, he reads books, plays with his bird or the silk worms, draws and draws etc....

10am is snack time and Emma is normally finished with her work. The kids then play until 12 noon when we have lunch.

Some afternoons we have extra murals or errands then we drive into town (we live on a small holding). If we are at home I put the boys down for a nap. As I work from home I spend the time they are sleeping, working. They normally wake around 3 pm and we have a snack.

The remainder of the afternoon the boys will play together and Emma and I will do some reading, Geography or Science together.

From 5 – 7 pm we make supper, tend to personal hygiene and by 7 pm they are all in bed.

The interesting thing is that although I often feel we've done so little, in fact SO much has happened. Interestingly though Kadin's passion for birds he's connected with one of the "very serious, much older" vets at my husbands work. This vet even brought Kadin his old binoculars, requests Kadin to bring his pictures for him to look through and they sit discussing different bird calls and which ones have migrated and when they'll be back. So maybe he hasn't done anything on paper and doesn't even own a workbook but he's learned to bridge a gap with a retiring man.

As other moms' days have changed with their kids as they grow older, I think ours will too but for today we just take each day as it comes....

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