May 24th, 2014

(Originally posted to Narrow Path Home Study blog on Weebly, now deleted.)

Whew! Week 1 is over! That was pretty intense!

We have had some blow ups this week with children not wanting to do their NP work. There have also been some rough days at school this week and that has definitely contributed to the behavior at home. However! Here's the light at the end of the tunnel. Lady Victoria has actually gotten in the habit already of getting home from school, coming to the nearest available parent and asking "Can I get on Dad's computer to do Narrow Path?"

Be still my beating heart!

I hear a lot of "This is easy!" under her breath. Of course Sir Alexander is usually in the room trying to do his TypingWeb and he is struggling. He gets super super frustrated with his fingers and there's a lot of growling and gnashing of teeth. I think part of the reason Lady Victoria says "Oh this is easy!" so much is to rub it in Alexander's face that she's better at this.

That is right up until I pointed out to her than she is still hunting and pecking keys which makes her accuracy high, but her speed Really Low.

So far though, they have sent me emails for Narrow Path. Alexander and I are corresponding by email and carrying on a conversation that way as well as through notes under his bedroom door (which is helping his handwriting). They have also put library books on hold by themselves, navigated to a World Book website, and printed their own documents as directed. In less than a week, they are already navigating through the items on their to do list without very much direction from me. I'm starting to leave detailed instructions off the pages, and instead of skipping it, they are maturely looking for me and asking me what I meant.

I really think it helped when I insisted I was new to this too. That they were helping me test it out. "Each week something might change," I told them. "Maybe I find a better way to lay out a page or find a new website I want to use."

They often ask if they can play some of the other activities on the sites I've had them go to. I have to tell them no every time. "But Mommy!" is often heard during Video Game time. It gets explained that I want to use some of those activities for NP later on and I don't need them using them up. They also giggle when told that their excitement for learning is awesome, but slow down! I can't keep up!

In other news however, we had a runaway cat for four days and that took up a lot of time as well as working on my own coursework for college. Fingers crossed this all keeps going in the right direction.

~Mom on a Narrow Path