Yesterday Hannah and I sat down with our end-of-day cup of tea and grinned at each other.
What a great day. Already we're seeing results.
We agreed that the most important ingredient of our new, togetherness-focused schooling day is me spending time teaching her kids, and her spending time teaching mine. Those stitches tend to draw us all together. It's challenging, but we're learning so much about each other. And although there was some pushback the first couple of times, I'm already seeing her Ben's shy grin a lot more brightly than I was just a couple of weeks ago, and she's already seeing my Milo respond cheerfully to his reading lessons with her.
Milo and Silas, our second-borns, are starting a new identity as "study buddies," now that we are doing their lessons together. They are not at the same level; but we sit them next to each other, and they take turns each doing one page of their reading lessons. They share a pencil between them, passing it back and forth. They listen and watch as the other does math, roughly the same level, one with Saxon and the other with Singapore Math. They had Bible stories together yesterday; Hannah discussed the Beatitudes with them while I guided Ben and Oscar through Latin drill (each at his own level).
And...
And...
There's so much less fighting! Everyone is getting along better. I'm not making it up -- we are seeing results already.
Today it felt for the first time not like a scarily difficult thing -- what we're doing now, me teaching hers and her teaching mine and drawing everybody together -- but like an exciting new challenge.
Possibly some of that feeling came from the extra coffee in the middle of the day.
But I think it's real.
Ben wrote out the sentence I dictated to the bigger boys today without complaint -- and he accepted my corrections of his spelling, capitalization, and mechanics and recopied it without hesitation! Hannah assures me this is a big deal. Oscar complains less about his workload when we write the to-do list for "Ben and Oscar" than when he's got his own and Ben's got his. Both of them listened with rapt attention today to our American History book -- several chapters from a biography of Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas -- even though the chapters were mostly about debates before the Spanish court. They paid attention! I asked questions -- and at least one of them knew the answers!
And we both agreed, too, that the effort to connect with each of the children -- mostly each other's children -- is spilling over into our own families. Things are better in our own homes. We are so continuing this into the future. Every day it is getting easier.
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