I’ll admit it, I tend to be lazy. The thought of sitting with my homeschooler and keeping him on task just doesn’t appeal to me. He hates worksheets and in order for him to get through his daily work I would need to monitor him. Not happening. So how do we get anything done?
A while back, I purchased an easel from IKEA. It has a whiteboard on one side and a chalkboard on the other. Jack loves to write and doodle on the whiteboard. We had a smaller whiteboard that stuck to the side of the refrigerator that I used one summer for math practice (Relaxed Summer School.) He became accustomed to seeing it first thing in the morning and getting his work done so he could go out and play. After fighting over worksheets for the thousandth time, it hit me, why not use the bigger whiteboard.
It started out small, just spelling words. But now most of the work that we once did with worksheets is on the easel. One side has math problems and the current week’s spelling words plus whatever else seems appropriate to put on there. Right now we are using flashcards to practice telling time and I clip one to the board each day for independent practice. The other side has copy work or sentence practice. The brilliance of the system is that I prep it the night before and Jack is responsible for getting the work done before I get home (yes, I work outside the home.)
On the days I am home, we can change up the format and play math and spelling games on the whiteboard instead. Spelling Hangman is easy on a whiteboard as are various math games and you don’t go through reams of paper. You can also drag the easel into the kitchen when you are doing Science so you can write down observations and hypotheses.
Remember when I said I was lazy? This system has allowed me to spend only 1 day a month on prepping. I set aside just one day at the end of every month to go over our progress and set up the next month’s work. I use a notebook to keep track of our homeschool activities and I simply write the spelling words and the math and copy work themes at the top of each week’s page. Then each night I just pull out the notebook and copy the next day’s work on to the easel. At the beginning of the year, I pull the spelling list from K12 Reader and look up the math and language arts standards from my State’s Department of Education website. As Jack masters each skill, I cross it off and move on to the next one. Now I realize that the early grades are easy and that as Jack gets into the higher grades, I will need to be more proactive about the peripheral subjects, but for now things are going great and as a bonus, he is learning about personal responsibility.
