Nicole's Adventures in Homeschooling: Official Second Day of School

Before I start my post I just want to explain something...:o)
Everyone in blog world seems to be using nick names for their kids..so I'm going to jump on board.....for safety reasons. When I was pregnant with my babies, I named my kids after animals.
So my 15 year old girl is Giraffe (my daughter hates this.....her aunty named her)
   11 year old girl is Monkey
   8 year old boy is Turtle (a turtle as a baby.....a rabbit as an 8 year old!)
   6 year old girl is Butterfly
   4 year old boy is Puppy (forever my puppy)
So from now on I will refer to each of them using their animal names.

Well I was out the door this morning at 7:45am for Monkey's first day of traditional school. Yikes.....waking up, and being ready for the day before 7:30am was quite the hardship! But we did it! We were out the door by 7:45. :o)

We had our official first day of homeschool yesterday. I didn't sleep more than three hours the night before....so needless to say it was a rough day. Monkey, really wanted to help out with HSing so even though I wasn't completely ready to start we did anyways.

Today was the first day we started with the Workbox system. Of course I read Sue's book front to back.....but ended up modifying her system a tad bit to suit our needs.
It worked out really well. Puppy LOVED it. He was the only one who finished all of his boxes. He loved completing a box and getting a new one, it was very satisfying for him.
Butterfly also enjoyed finishing a box and getting a new one.
Turtle......had a bit of difficulty. He only completed 2 1/2 boxes. And we worked from 11:00 until 3:30pm. There was a lot of crying. He hates doing the workbook pages, and three pages just happened to be in his first workbox and then three more in his third. He was okay with the sentence making game in the second workbox but he just really struggles with the workbook pages. Tomorrow I'm going to try and move the harder boxes toward the end of the day.

We worked so hard that we didn't even get to the fun stuff I had planned so that will be slotted in tomorrow.

So here is how I set my workbox system.

I have 8 workboxes for Turtle and Butterfly and 7 for Puppy.
I borrowed the round tags from Mama Jenn
I have green tag numbers for Turtle, Pink for Butterfly and Blue for Puppy.
I made up a schedule grid in microsoft word. Each child has there own.
After school I'm going to fill the boxes for the following school day, while the kids are outside running around with the neighborhood children.
I'm going to place my tags on the boxes in numerical order.
Then go to my schedule grid and stick extra activity tags on the children's schedule in the order I want them to happen during the day. So I try and guess which box the kids will be working on around lunch time, for example, so I can place the lunch tag in that spot. The children will start with the first box. After completing a box they will remove the #1 tag from the box and stick it to the schedule and then put everything back into the box and replace the completed work and workbox on the shelf. The children will then take the next box, bring it back to their table and do the work from that box. Any extra supplies that they don't have in their pencil case will be included in the box.
Each child will keep their schedule on their table so they always know how much more work they need to complete before they are finished for the day.

Here are the kids schedule grids ready to go for tomorrow.

I can already see that this system is going to provide us with the physical order we require. It's amazing how much work we ended up completing on the first day.....and the children generally worked very independently. Much more independent that in the past.

Want to see an example?
Here is Butterfly's grid schedule.
She has completed three boxes and it is now lunch time, after lunch she will complete three more boxes, have a snack and then two more boxes and then do some reading. And then she will be finished for the day.