It’s a Sick Day

We usually have weekends on Ama’s day off and have our school days when he’s at work. It’s a perfect way of having family time despite the BPO work schedule. So on Saturdays, Ozzy and I are supposed to be having a school day. But his cough is so bad it kept him up last night and he couldn't get out of bed this morning so I had to feed him. Poor kid. He‘s got snot coming out of him, coughs intermittently, and has decided to stay in bed. (Judging from the amount of legos dragged into the bed.)

I’ve noticed he’s been getting sick a lot lately. I think this might be because he’s been too clean and safe at home.  You develop stronger resistance in school from most viruses when you’re exposed to many other kids. So here we are, coughing again just like the end of August. I shouldn’t be too worried. Sigh.

Anyway, so here’s a chance to write some things down.

Our home school is coming along just fine. There’s a lot documentation that has to be done: portfolios as evidences of learning, records of attendance and activities, and assessments (Ozzy was scheduled for Math assessment today, but that’s not going to happen). When I was teaching, this is the part I hated. I liked making lesson plans, but not assessments and record keeping. I try to do them well because of the responsibility attached to it, but sincerely, I just want my students to have fun while working and grade them based on how much fun they had a.k.a. applying themselves (haha, there goes my teaching licence).

The good thing about home schooling is that there’s no mean, median, mode. You’re not comparing him to an average number of students. So the approach is really on a case to case basis. This means you can keep studying difficult areas longer and easy skills faster. This is actually very helpful to Ozzy and very fulfilling to me as teacher. I am so happy to see my son put more effort to things that are difficult to him allowing him to experience success when he does it right. His favourite line after a mistake is “Let’s do it again.”

Academic time has also been my concern. I have counted the number of days and plotted lolo and lola’s visits (my parents and husband’s) to make the academic days required. I will be including some field trips during the visits so that we can count some trips as academic time. We are in a foreign country after all and cultural/ science trips are up on my list of places to go. So we’re holding off trips until family members come. We do go out for park visits when the activity requires it. There’s not much nature all around though (not like what we have in Antipolo) so we just kinda pick things up from the planter boxes in the “backyard”.

Nonetheless, documents are due by the end of next week. I have written to my adviser and she has assured me that I was doing well. Haha. It’s not over till it’s over though. I have to get my documents in line. Another sigh.