FIRST DAY OF #UNSCHOOL?!? ORIENTATION DAY & WHAT HAPPENED WHEN WE SAID " NO MORE SCHOOL!?!"

[Music] no I have been organizing all the things to fit better into our new on school days and today was our very first a day like official day it was orientation day wake up make bed confessions and the breakfast pick out the dirty laundry make chocolate and at nine o'clock huh yes we had like a legit orientation day and it's gonna be followed by a few days or several days of training because that's the kind of mom I am okay but I thought that I would sit here and turn this camera on and and talk a little bit about the day and what I did and what I felt like was a big success um in the day and the things that have got me excited I have not played her out I think I told you guys in the last video that I was gonna be using my planner a little bit differently and how that is is I use an undated planner in the front section all of the months are together and then in the back section of the planner since is undated all of the weeks are together and so I thought that it would be really cool to go ahead and plan my days play my mom's in the month sections but in the daily sections I would just use the little spaces that are there for each day to journal the hope is to just keep a journal a daily documentation of what we did and what stood out to me the most I like the idea of keeping it in the planner because of the spacing because if you give me a whole blank page I do too much okay so I thought if I just kind of keep it short and sweet and simple within the margins would just be nice and simple just writing down things that matter the most and give me a little bit of a push into the next day [Music] so I'm gonna tell you what we did today starting out the day with a bit of an orientation and I just thought it was a good idea because I feel like the kids know our normal routine and schedule and since we're switching it up a bit it's important that I communicate to them what my thoughts and ideas are and then once it's communicated we can spend our days kind of working towards those goals so I like to give them a little bit of an orientation just to get the mix I'm gonna let them know it is something a little bit new but we can do this together you know what I'm saying I did go ahead and get them new water bottles because that's what I had and they loved stuff like that and I gave them new tees because their old ones were getting too small I know I know this is extra but I already told y'all it was coming they have business cards I wanted them to have business cards because I thought well all of us have business cards because I thought that as we go out and as we talk to people about who we are and what we do and what we're looking to do and that we're looking to collaborate it would be nice to be able to leave them with something that helps them to remember us so I thought business cards would be a great way to provide like an invitation to connect while we're out and about in addition to that I talked to you guys about what my main goal was in developing a newer family rhythm and so with that some of the tasks that I had that belonged to that goal were refreshing our chore chart our rewards chart our new morning routine and nighttime routine in hopes that they will truly become routines and that will give them kind of permission to go off and do what they need to do while being able to still earn rewards for the work that they are completing if that makes any sense so I did that and I'm very excited about it and laminated them last night and put them in everybody's room but I thought I would show you guys so I have a morning and nighttime routine wake up make bed brush teeth wash face confession stress breakfast quick clean worship that type of deal and then all the way into our ninth so I have one printed out and laminated and put in each of their rooms so that they understand what the expectation is there you guys already know this we are not radical on scores I do have expectations for them that I believe will lead them into lives of good discipline and proper structure and order so that they can accomplish the goals that they set for themselves based off of where their purpose leads them the next thing I have is our chore chart it's pretty much the same to our chart that we always use I just kind of refreshed it and gave some more tasks to some more people yes so this is our same chore chart they are color coded just like they always have been they love being color coded and I love it too so Cameron it's blue candle if green Savannah it's pink of course I have my rewards chart my rewards chart is the absolute same I just printed out a new one and laminated it so that they could have a refresher on how we were going to be redeeming our tokens I know that there's no manual on this thing and I don't want there to be so the way that I approached it is that during our training week which for right now is just going to be this week possibly next week because again I want to try to communicate to them what thoughts I have because as far as they're concerned they know that they're moving along like they normally do and now I'm shaking things up and doing things a little differently I don't know if I mentioned this or not but when I sat them down for the first time and let them know that we were going to be moving into more of an unschooling approach I call the quick meetings that's them all down and said okay you guys what would you say if I told you there was no more school yeah I thought somebody would jump up and down and start screaming and get excited it was the total opposite it was a total opposite camera looked at me and was like but I don't know everything I need to know yes I love these kids so much and Savannah was just completely confused and looking at her brothers for approval or some kind of signal or something we went ahead and talked about all the things and the reason why mommy feels like this would be good fit in what the differences would be and why and all that other stuff so starting things out I thought that it would be good during our training time to still stick to our main schedule so I use my iCal and I have a basically kind of sort of a block schedule that I've used before that they are very used to and we are still going to move along in our day the first thing that starts off our school day typically is a morning walk and then after our morning walk is our brain and logic work we are still moving along in that same schedule so the first difference that I laid out to them was that we weren't going to move along in our schedule because that is a way for us to be good stewards of our time so we have time blocks under which we work on certain things because I expressed to them it is really important for us to give our attentions to things that we want to grow but the difference is that instead of having specific things that I have set out for them to accomplish or finish for the day they would be responsible for deciding what they would like to get better at or work on in any given subject matter if that makes any sense so for instance if we are working on problem solving which is our version of math right now they get to decide what things they would like to strengthen at the moment that may be telling time on an analog clock that is something Savannah has chosen lately today Cameron chose to work on his conversions between percentages and decimals and fractions and all of that stuff so that was what he chose to work on during our problem-solving time of the day [Music] it's been interesting because I am trying to find a way to give them space but then also be there to lead into God it's been working out really well but I would say that in your mind you still kind of want to revert and I think they also do too so they'll often come up to me and say well what's next and I want to kind of shape them from that one thing Savannah did today when she was doing her quiet reading time was we normally set a timer for our first section of quiet reading and it's typically around 15 to 30 minutes so today she said okay I'm setting my time for 15 minutes and I said well today I don't want you to set a timer today I want you to set the stopwatch instead and I want you to just read until you feel like you're you know finished reading for the moment because I want you to enjoy it and so that's what we did she turned on her stopwatch and it turned out that she read until about 17 or 18 minutes and then decided that she would just close the pages and save it for another time during the day or maybe even tomorrow so that worked out really well I feel like it did a good job completing that um I am gonna tell you all about like the breakdown with each of them individually because I think we have some really really cool things already starting that have come from our first like family meeting or a family unschool meeting I guess so I want to tell you all about each one of their pathways that we have chosen so far that they have chosen or laid out so far I want to tell you about Savannah but that probably won't be in this video because it'll be way too long but the short of it is with Savannah she loves the idea of doing school and so I thought a great way for her to still fit into our unschool plans but still be able to do school the way she would envision is to start a school of her own so we actually have a school for stuffies like stuffies like her stuffed animals she's a stinking cute she's so cute with it um but I'll tell you all about how we decided to lay that out and make those plans but that is what she did today she she worked on the things she needed to work on she did her addition her subtraction subtraction is not her favorite so that is something that she worked on today with her stuffies and she did an incredible job so we just have our time blocks that we are all kind of working on improving our skills based on whatever type of work that might be so whether it's our journalists work which you guys know is our language arts or our problem solving which is our math we just give our attentions to whatever that may be during the time frame and then just kind of check in with one another to see if anybody needs any help or if anybody has anything that they learned that they felt like sharing then that's what we do so I feel like that went extremely well today Kendall got out his cookbooks today and started to write down some of the ingredients and things that he needed and I'm just been I encouraged them all throughout the day to really think about the things that they would like to put their hands to the things that they would like to study for themselves and that's what we did and so while we did that I just kind of took notes of certain things and those are the things that I'm gonna put into my little space inside of my planner so that I do not forget because I feel like that is key there's so many like enlightening moments throughout our days with our kids and you get so like really pumped about it and you may even go and tell someone else about it and then shortly thereafter you forget and I think those are the things that really strengthen my confidence in the path that we have chosen and so I want to make sure that being diligent and writing those things out so that is a little bit easier for me to remember them and piece all of those things together yes that is what we did today I feel really good I feel really really good we've had kind of our ups and downs in my organizing process of this whole on school thing from the time that I first communicated it to everybody to the time where I kind of tried to figure out how I was gonna organize things and make sense of them um I did go through my work boxes and clear the work boxes out and like reorganize them I made new stickers for their work boxes so that the subjects now reflect the job that they'll be doing for instance with their math work box it is now called or renamed the problem solver at work box yeah I just did that with all of their work boxes and just let them know what I did and why and everybody seems to be really on board we really jumped back into our token system we always use our token system which maybe I'll have another video on that so you assume that I can explain properly how we use it but there are times when I use it more loosely and then times when I am a bit more heavy on it and this is one of those times where we are a bit more heavy because we really want to impress upon them the reward of working diligently on things and not having to be reminded or pushed or coerced or whatever the case may be I think that tokens are a great way for them to be able to understand the concept of rewarding true diligence so that is what we're doing um that is how today is gone and now I'm having some coffee I'm gonna get this stuff written in and then I have to move on to the next portion of my date oh we have been we did end the day with a planning session so I said freak out their new planners we have a lot of time for us to be able to work on our what we call jobs and that ends around 2:30 right now and so from the time between 2:30 and bedtime they are able to plug in anything that they want to work on savanah today wrote I think she wrote in around like 2:30 or 3:00 o'clock that she would call her best friend and around I don't know 7:30 or so she would give out hugs it was the cutest thing ever so the goal is for them to get used to adding things intentionally to the time periods of their day I think this is gonna be a really good thing because they'll really get to wrap their minds around the concept of their own time so I'm very happy about that I'm very excited about it and I think they are too they're feeling like they have more ownership over their day and the way they spend their day of course that's just today I'm hoping that that is more of our days than not but this was our first official day of unschooling and our orientation day so our plan of doing the training like I said for the week and that's just to really set the scene for them before I just kind of let them fly on their own maybe after this time period I let them shake up the times in the day and let them have more ownership over more time of the day but I thought this would be a good start I don't just want to let them you know toss them out there into the wind and expect them to pick up books and read them all day I do think that they need some direction and some understanding of what our purpose what our goals are adding this to our days with this being our new lifestyle of living and learning together so yeah life is so very full of lessons so the goal is to

Channel: TheFallCoFamily

Views: 3,698

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Keywords: homeschooling, homeschooling mom, homeschool room tour, homeschool classroom tour, homeschool curriculum, homeschool curriculum choices, homeschool haul, homeschool library haul, Charlotte Mason method, Abeka curriculum, homeschool vs public school, homeschool morning routine, homeschool coop, homeschool tips, SAHM, stay at home mom, clean with me, marriage and motherhood, family vlog

Id: 35Lh6hVn52g

Length: 17min 7sec (1027 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 20 2020