Back to Routine

School begins for me tomorrow with a Pupil Free Day and it may as well be beginning for the boys because they have to be out the door with me at the same time to be minded by my parents. A and I have had big discussions tonight and one of the topics was the need for a regular routine rather than taking each day as it comes. So I went back to a routine I planned the the start of the year, tweaked it and we'll give it another go. It means I only get one longer afternoon at school which is difficult but I need to get the boys home to do homework regularly - even D is going to have home readers this term so the trade off may have to be some weekend work and sticking rigidly to the early mornings especially when the boys have before school care.
The other big ticket items on my agenda are a regular sleep routine and getting to the gym regularly so we've got gym times in the routine. I'll report back here so people can cheer me on when I get to the gym, and cheer me on even more when I lose weight!
So here's the plan for school weeks in the McNamara household:

Mondays - Before School Care, Drop boys to Grandma and go to gym
Tuesdays - Afternoon tea at the shopping centre and library visit/small grocery shop
Wednesdays - After School Care/Staff Meeting, Gym
Thursdays - A picks up boys, Weight Watchers, Hockey Training (for the boys)
Fridays - Leave school at 3:30pm - good day for play dates!
Saturdays - Hockey at 8:30am (for the boys), Gym

Wish me luck for getting up early in the morning!

Homework Time

The school holidays are drawing to a close which means that for me, life gets very busy again very soon. One of the things we've found difficult over the past 2.5 years that E has been getting homework is the organising of the supplies.
Even though I preach to parents at school about the need for a good consistent daily homework routine I don't always achieve that with E. Part of the reason is that he is coping very well with his school work and can race through his homework fairly easily at this stage so it is pretty easy to just do the written stuff on a Monday and then hurriedly finish filling out the reading log on a Thursday night. E doesn't read to us at night anymore because he's well and truly into chapter books. Now that I've done the First Steps Reading In-Service at school I can see a need for him to read more complex texts to me and that is something else I am going to work on. Another reason that we dont stop and do table top tasks every day is the actual table. A few years ago we hada table that seated four and always stayed fairly clear because it had to. Now we have a table that seats six and one end is always covered with "stuff" including stray pens, pencils, erasers, scissors and all the things possibly needed for homework.
One of the points raised in the parent teacher interview for D was that he needs to practice forming his numbers and letters before he needs to put more of his thinking on paper when he starts Year 1 next year. I though being able to find a pencil and an eraser wasa good start!
So I wanted all the supplies in one spot and I wanted plenty of them. I already had a basket but it was in great disarray with everything everywhere so I dumped it all out and started again with some extra supplies we bought with our groceries today.
The final photo is a closer peek into our basket where we've got good supplies of glue, sticky tape and scissors and a laminated card with Queensland Beginners Alphabet for D and a Macquarie personal dictionary which E used at school in year 1 and 2 and I continue to use with him now at home.
So we're all organised and will now have to work on our weekly routine so that there is a bit of time spent around the homework table every night if possible.