August 8, 2020 (Saturday, Sabbath)

Dear Diary,
 
Today is the eighth day of homeschooling for my seven-year-old son. Even though he woke up at 9 am, we just started at 2:50 pm because I was busy applying for jobs online and doing house chores.

As usual, we started with a prayer and with identifying the date today. When he looked outside the window, my son was sure that today is a rainy day. He also sang the national anthem for practice and habit.

We then proceeded to our review of Mathematics lessons which we discussed yesterday. This took us one hour and 20 minutes since my son is being lazy today. He was already asking for a break, even though we just started. Despite my son’s acting up, I stood my ground and waited for him to complete the task that I gave him before we moved on to the next topic. When he realized that he cannot change my mind, he finally tried to complete the task albeit being disappointed that he did not get what he wanted. The good thing is that he now knows the days of the week both in English and Tagalog according to their proper sequence.

The next topic is Civics and we watched a video that advises not to add strangers as ‘friends’ online to be safe. We discussed the lesson from the story and finished it all in 15 minutes. But then my son asked to rewatch the video because he finds the video animation cool so I allowed him to do that.

After my son is satisfied with watching the video, we learned how to use the Dictionary app on the computer today. Our word for today was ‘stranger”. We were finished in just five minutes!

My son was excited about the Science topic since it is about the body. I found that he does not need a review of this since he knows the parts of his body quite well. We spent 10 minutes on this because I just wanted to confirm. But had I listened to him when he said that he knows it already, we would have been finished 5 minutes earlier.

Our next subject was English and I let my son practice his spelling drills. I gave him 20 minutes to prepare for the quiz but he chose to just start to get it over with. I asked him twice if he really chooses to start instead of studying more and he chose to start right away. In the middle of the quiz, he slipped and told me that he was confident since he has a cheat sheet. I was hurt. It was sad. I explained that I never really intended to spank him. I just wanted him to study more. And when he finished the quiz, he only got two correct spellings out of 10. 

I decided to stop our session for today at 5:34 pm and decided that it was time to punish him so he will see the seriousness of his actions. Cheating your way through life won’t do you any good. I don’t want him to think that he can cheat his way through.

My husband hid all of my son’s mobile devices, canceled his Netflix time, and uninstalled all his games. Suffice it to say that he is basically grounded.

My husband talked with me and asked if we could take a break on weekends. But it was only our third day back! I will see for myself how he performs tomorrow. Who knows? He could be distracted because my husband is around today.

Another factor that could be considered is the daily load. By the time we had problems today, he was already on his fifth subject. But we only had 2-3 subjects per day in the last four days. Maybe I could also make the load lighter before making changes with the intervals for rest days.

If he does not perform well after making changes with the load, I will probably make the rest days after every four days instead of five. Maybe that will make a difference. 

If after changing the rest days to every four days, he doesn’t perform better, I will make it every three days. If it still doesn’t work out, I will make it every two days. If that still does not work out, I will make it every other day. My son might be experiencing fatigue or he might just be plainly distracted. I guess I will have to see for myself.

Out of every daily habit that we practice, my son wasn’t able to make the bed today. That was because there was always somebody curling up on the bed due to the cold weather today.

Today’s subjects included:
- Civics
- Computer
- Science
- English (Reading, Speaking, Spelling, and Writing)

However, due to today’s poor performance, we will have English again tomorrow. I finalized “his notes” for today and prepared the lesson for tomorrow in 25 minutes. That’s it for our eighth day!