Study Time

Emma gets up early every morning. She typically wakes up at 6:30 a.m. while Da and I prefer to sleep until 7:30 or 8:00 whenever possible. For a while her morning routine consisted of t.v. or computer until we woke up. But just about every morning there were questions or problems. "Mama! My computer says something, can you come read it!"

Makes it hard to sleep in if Emma keeps asking me questions.

Now that we are at Gramma and Boppa's, the computer and the t.v. are upstairs. We would like her to stay downstairs until the rest of the house wakes up, so we started a new routine yesterday.

When Emma wakes up, she will work on "school" for a about 10 minutes (or longer if she wants to). This consists of working in her work books (she has math, writing, puzzles, etc), drawing, reading, etc.

There are 3 reasons why I think this setup will work. 1.) There are not a lot of distractions at 6:30 in the morning and, 2.) She works better when I am not breathing down her neck, 3.) She truly enjoys working in her working in her work books.

I have a tendency to say "Let's just do one more page," or "Let's just finish this up," or "Why don't we do the pages in order." With me not being part of the equation she can work on whatever she wants in whatever order she wants.

Once I get up, I will look over her work and she gets to put a sticker on the pages that she has completed. Stickers are so cool.

If there are pages that are half finished I might suggest we finish them so she can put a sticker on the page, but for the most part this is her gig. I look through her work more for my benefit then hers and if I notice mistakes, I let her know and we work on fixing them together. Then I date the page and we are done.

Yesterday Emma did about 8 pages in one of her work books. She also drew a picture of an Ardennes horse (after looking in one of her horse books) and wrote the name of the horse on the paper as well. Once I got up, I read the paragraph that went along with the horse for her.

This morning was a bit different. A crappy nights sleep leads to some crabby people but she still managed to get a bit of work done in her work books. I ended up getting up with her so I took a picture of her working (and yes, I kept suggesting she do one more page).

And just for the heck of it, here is the bookcase next to her desk. Her tinker toy creations are on top; kid markers, higher end markers and stationary are next; a giant tub of crayons (and we have more floating around the house somewhere) and her plastic critters in a jar in the middle; coloring books, blank notebooks, and paper on the bottom.

I am sure over time we will play with the set up, but for now she seems to like it.