A bit of our Afterschooling - getting in a rhythm

pardon the picture quality - my poor little digital camera doesn't really like it after dark. :(

For the last three weeks, I have made it a new rule that we just sit down and do the afterschooling workbooks the minute we get in the house after school. We drag all our stuff in out of the car, I put the tea kettle on and grab a snack for the kids, and they sit down and do their daily work.

The beauty is that after the initial period of being angry about doing it and wanting a "break first!", they are now in a rhythm and it has become a habit. It's so much of a habit that they even expect to do it on weekends, and we'll have to say "no, it's Sunday - no afterschooling today!".

I'm not asking them to do that much - if I start cooking dinner while they are working they are always done before dinner is - Carbon does one page of Math U See and 2 pages of Explode the Code, while Hypatia has an alphabet and a numbers workbook, and she does as many pages as she can before we convince her to stop. It's the right amount of work for the amount of time we have, and it doesn't overwhelm anyone.

And then Carbon has been adding some things, getting us to do them with him because they are "afterschooling". He has a science kit, and has us sit down and do an experiment with him. Or, as pictured above, he gets out some props and has us read to him out of How Things Work while he models the processes with blocks. He still enjoys for me to read to him out of The Story of the World, and he also likes to get us to play board games with him that have educational value (don't they all?), such as Flip Four or Sum Swamp. So he's adding to his own afterschooling, voluntarily.

This rhythm sure feels good. It fits into our lives, without being too much. This extra, family-style, education is just part of our lifestyle, not a burden or a horrible chore.