Uprooting

The middle school homeschool has a new location:  London.

We arrived last week and life has become the classroom.

I've lost track exactly, but I think that we've had a good three weeks without much formal schooling.  There was the Washington DC road trip with Grandpa and Grandma followed by the uprooting of our home to move to London.  In preparation for departure, there were about 10 days of worthlessness; and upon arrival, there has been about 10 days of worthlessness. Worthlessness of the teacher, let's be clear!  I imagine more experienced home educators might suggest that there has been a great deal of learning taking place during this unique life experience.  However as this inexperienced and nervous-about-progress home educator sees things, I'm guessing that we've got some serious make-up work to do. 

In the past couple of days we have returned to our math curriculum.  General knowledge agrees that math is the backbone of the home school education. 

So we've got a starting point.  But now, instead of being able to focus on my middle schooler, I've also got a 4th grader and a kindergartner to teach at the same time. 

Shiny new library cards were handed to the kids two days ago, and that has been fantastic - they can start reading at their leisure again.  My next goal is to return to reading aloud.  They've been fidgety, argumentative, and distracted when I've read to them these past few days (albeit for very short times - like 10 minutes per day - maybe we just need more lengthy reading times).  General adjustments perhaps.  I've got a great history text, A Little History of the World, to read, and I really want to grab their attention with it.  But it just hasn't hooked them yet.  Let's hope for that to happen soon!