Читать книгу Homeschooling For Dummies - Jennifer Kaufeld - Страница 71

You’re home from the hospital, the bambino never sleeps more than one hour at a time, and you already wish the little critter could walk. Which parent normally takes charge of the children during school time is pretty irrelevant at this point: Everybody’s tired when a new baby comes to stay, and life goes on hold for awhile.

When diapers and feedings fill your life, it seems like one more thing will send you over the edge. Yet your older children need to put in a “good” school day; they need time and energy, too. You can make homeschooling work with an infant without earning your Super-Driven Parent of the Year Award or purchasing a one-way ticket to the funny farm.

Unfortunately, a new child generally doesn’t choose the most convenient time to announce its arrival. If you plan to produce a child during the off-school summer months, you’re dreaming or you have better planning skills than I ever did. So far, I’ve managed the oh-no-we’re-halfway-into-fall child and the oops-it’s-not-time-for-spring-vacation-what-do-we-do-now baby.

Although I can’t do anything about the physical toll a new baby takes, these suggestions for homeschooling survival may make your way a bit easier:

 Turn baby care time into home economics class for an older child. Diapering, feeding, cooing, and cuddling are all considered a part of Child Development class in the public high schools. Take advantage of your homegrown opportunity to teach the basics to your other children. Giving an older child — one who is ready for such responsibility — the baby to care for one morning a week after a period of solid training frees you for teaching, paperwork, or a long hot bath. And it gives the older sibling the training most of us wish we’d had before we found ourselves caring for our own little drooling bundles of love.

 Take advantage of natural down times. You have to feed the baby on and off throughout the day anyway. Babies don’t do well with cereal for breakfast and nothing to eat until that cheeseburger for lunch. Because feeding becomes part of your daily routine, take advantage of it! While you’re feeding, listen to emerging readers strut their stuff, pile onto the bed together for an oral history lesson, ask an older child to read the next chapter of that book that you’re working through together, or practice the foreign language you’ve been learning as a family. “I kiss my pig on the mouth” (“J’embrasse mon couchon sur la bouche!”) may sound kind of strange in French, but if your youngsters have the vocabulary for sentences like that, such pronouncements are guaranteed to keep their interest while you feed the baby.

 Put everybody under three feet tall down for a nap. Then take that time to work with the older children on the subjects that require one-on-one attention or pull out the science equipment marked Use Caution or Not For Use By Children Under X Years of Age and conduct the experiments that you wanted to do for the past two months.

 Institute quiet time for the entire household. You don’t have to jump up from the kitchen table and rush back to the schoolroom or computer. Sometimes, marking that hour or two after lunch as quiet time puts a little sanity back into your day. Put the tiniest family member down for a nap and distribute books to everybody who is both too old and too young to take a nap — when they reach college age, they’ll appreciate naptime once again. You’re allowed to lie down with a book, too! After everyone catches some well-deserved rest, then continue with your day. You may even find that your littlest ones (or you) face the rest of the afternoon with a better attitude.

A baby’s arrival is a great time to take a vacation from school. One of the wonderful things about home education is that you can take a vacation when you need it rather than when the calendar says to take a break.

Although your neighbors may not be doing it, life still continues if you take a month or two off in February — or whenever your bundle arrives at your house. Then teach through the summer days to make up for “lost” time. Even if your house lacks air conditioning, learning outside under the trees creates memories that your students keep alive forever. They treasure the memories or laugh over them — depending whether they recall the warm breeze flowing over them as they read Lorna Doone aloud or the ant hill they mistakenly sat on.

You can also plan ahead and take two days off through the winter holidays instead of two weeks. That gives you eight days to play with when you need to take time off later. Drop those days into your planning schedule when you suddenly need time off or incorporate them into the infant arrival period. Those eight days give you almost two “free” weeks that you don’t have to make up for later because the children already did the work.