If I ever came to your home to help with the academics for a week, this is how I would envision it. Your family does whatever they want all day. All they have to do is be AROUND – each one quickly retrievable by me, at the drop of a hat – you doing your own "normal" schooling or non-schooling or chores or not chores – however YOU want to do those days – even chaotic make-shift days are fine with me. :) morning sickness, or all day sickness is totally understood by me, as well. I've seen it all. I simply do not care about what's going on in the background. I'm USED to it all, from being in the trenches with other large families.
I escape to the corner of the living room with one child at a time to diagnose what is most needed and then start shoring those areas up with them, cycling through child after child. I'm loaded with academic tricks and shortcuts :) And then gradually work them into more and more connections with their own to-do charts and ACE paces. I'd like to get the younger three launched FASTER with learning to read. I'd like to teach chording for piano lessons for them, cover general key academic facts, get them typing, world map reading, etc., so that by the time I leave they ALL know how to proceed BETTER in the academic world by themselves as much as possible – i.e. they are more comfortable with where they are headed. And we would have already GAINED significant academic ground DURING that week.
Now, since most likely the above visit isn’t going to happen, perhaps you can use these thoughts to tweak how you will approach your project, your mission as a homeschooling mom, as we approach the start of the new calendar year. Use out big book of thousands of tried and try ideas, Launching Your Homeschool, as the outside influence you may be needing to get your homeschooling purring more regularly and more successfully.
