Another day

Another day of sunshine and heavy showers. It's good spring weather for the plants, plenty of water and plenty of sunshine. Not so good for humans in the garden though, so I just look at it and wait....
Until we moved here I home educated cooperatively with friends. Since they were four years old the boys got used to meeting up and working with other children. This means that now they are used to the idea of me coming up with things for them to do. I give them flexibility of when they do things, and I don't force them to do stuff they hate (they accept maths like its a necessary burden). But in the end they look to me for the structure.
I wonder if Ia will be different. We make a separation between the weekend and weekdays. They know there is a routine to weekdays, and they will be doing learning stuff. I noticed today how Ia uses her own time differently on weekdays. Today she wanted to cut out more spring bird and flower pictures, stick them in her scrapbook, then label them (with my help). Later she wanted to use some educational software. Maybe her different experiences will make her more of a self directed learner from an earlier age. It's nice to be able to observe this, alhamdulillah.
Bit of a slow day today really. The boys did another section of Engineering Interact, their normal maths, English and Quran and began planning for a lapbook on Yusuf (as). I gave them the book on Prophet Yusuf (as), and also showed them the page of the Lapbook Handbook which describes the different folds. Their task was to decide what information to present and the types of folds they could use. They went about this by sketching out a layout for their projects, with title notes. Between them they had a good variety of ideas for us to get started with in days to come, maashAllah.
I've not been very good at keeping to a regular timetable recently. There are so many projects to do and as usual I want to do them all at once. But this is not possible. The geography is on hold just now, while we concentrate on learning about the lapbooks, but I will get back to it over time inshAllah. If anything the topic of food and farming is even more relevant at the moment, what with the food crisis in many countries. So much to do...so much to learn....