This week is our first week back “at school”.

We took the first week of term off as a holiday because the kids just managed to complete enough of the unfinished core curricula from last year shortly before that. Considering they spent most of their summer break doing the catch up, it seemed to be fair and sensible not to start back at it so quickly.

It’s gone really well for the first couple of days. We decided to try a randomised method of deciding on the daily work. This way there are, hopefully, going to be fewer arguments over what joint subjects to do and when.

The kids have figured out how many sessions of each subject area they need to do each week. They reduced it down to a four day week because we think our Wednesdays are going to be full with other activities.
Miss Oh Waily made tiny little notes of each of the subject areas. She folded them up and put in to her winter wooly hat. They both take turns to pick a paper note out of the hat and do whatever lesson it says.

And then came the spanner in the works.

The only problem that has arisen was when I went to find which branch of the library one of the core science books was held at. I couldn’t find it in the catalogue.

I did a double take. Then I checked for the authors in case I was making an error in the title, but nothing. Now I began to wonder if I was imagining things.
Did I see it in the catalogue just before Christmas or was I dreaming?

So to keep a long story short, it was culled over the New Year season and someone snapped it up on the 50c table!

This is our first year of partially relying on the library to have the books we want to use. Every other year we have bought them all. That was partially because our local library is a little less *worldly* than our libraries in Wellington were, and partially because if you’ve bought it you’ve got it when you need it and you don’t have to rearrange your life around a 3 to 4 week waiting list.

Lesson learned. Buy most of the key books.

So one of the science curricula is off to a shaky start. We are now at the whims and mercy of the Book Depository gods! Let’s hope they smile on us and it’s only a couple of weeks till it arrives.

A successful and stress-ish free start to the year.
Most of the work is completed before or just after lunch (if we mess around a bit too long in the morning) which means there’s plenty of time to extend the summer holiday feeling by playing in the pool in the afternoon.

Long may this continue!