Alls well that ends well

I am kind of proud with how I handled a difficult homeschooling day yesterday. Princess Belle was tired and grouchy and not in the mood to do schoolwork. Now once we are doing this for longer, I don't mind declaring a tired day holiday, but this is too early in the game and she is the sort that would begin to expect that every day. (I have a feeling that was partly what was behind the meltdowns at school, not at first but when they began to happen daily) I have to set a precedent that homeschool is important and we need to do it.

So anyway, she started off poorly with a horrible attitude and refusing to do her work. I simply told her that if she wasn't going to do any of schooling or if she was going to have a bad attitude, she could spend some time in her room. She went in there and then five minutes later came back, apologized and asked to do school. She tried it again later with the same results. After that she was doing her work and had a better attitude. While I was helping her, I decided I needed to do something to make the day a little better since she was having such a rough time, so I came up with creative ideas to catch her interest. She read a story, then she acted out the paragraphs to me, then she illustrated it. This was to help her understand the pictures that words can create in our heads. For science we talked about the water cycle and then we put a glass of water with a mark on it in the window to watch it daily and see if the water evaporates. For health, we were discussing feelings. So after we discussed them, I had her draw a picture with feeling words all over it. She turned the words into the shape of a happy face, which I thought was very creative. Then she did a picture with a feeling word (Happy) in the middle and happy things all around the word. For art, she did a self-portrait. The day ended on a happy note with her feeling excited and happy about homeschooling and on a day when she would have gotten nothing done in public school, we got everything done.

Princess Belle performing for her dolly audience