Torturing Children... Or Review Work

Oh, the inhumanity, the terror, the cruelty.  I, horrible slave master that I am, am brutally forcing my ungrateful heathens to complete >>GASP<< review work!  Joking aside, the way they are acting, I might as well be standing over them with a whip forcing them into slave labor.  Goodness knows my house would be cleaner and I would be less stressed.  

I always have a hard time getting back into the swing of things after a summer off.  I suppose if I were a good little home school teacher I would keep some semblance of a schedule through the summer as well.  

Fact: I am way too lazy for that.  

I always get excited about the start of a new school year, seeing all the school supplies in the aisles, ordering new books, fresh information.  Yeah, I pretty much know it all already but it's still a nice change from the same old same old of the year before.  I do like to make my kids get slowly back in the swing of things before jumping in head first.  

I pulled a few key assignments that they had covered the year before, a few from all of their key subjects, along with a last leisure book of summer.  Reading gets real during the school year, with activities and work to go along with it.  In the summer, reading is required but it is their choice and just for fun.  

I divided these assignments into their folders by days of the week, simple tasks that shouldn't take too long or be too difficult.  Just a little something to gradually get them back in the swing of devoting a couple hours a day to school when previously we've been on full summer mode.  

We do summers real at our house.  My Monster, she is lean, tan, and looks the part of a scraped, dirty street urchin.  She plays outside almost all day with the neighborhood kids and she plays hard.  Riding her bike, climbing trees, jumping on the trampoline and running through sprinklers.  Her knees have been busted open by bike crashes, her feet are calloused, her hair is wild and her arms are covered in sap residue and scratches.  I couldn't be prouder!  

My Monkey treasures some of his sister free time by playing online games with his friends.  I always wondered how he would navigate that pre-teen talk on the phone phase of his life, now that we are a cellular society.  We don't have a home phone, and I keep refusing him a cell phone on principle.  I don't really know what principle, honestly.  Probably budget... yeah we'll go with that.  So I wondered how he would chat with his friends without that awkward ringing of the home phone.  I shouldn't have worried.  He uses his tablet to face time them, he uses his Wii-U to video chat them, he plays video games with them.  He's not missing out, it's just the times, they are a changing.  

He spends a fair amount of time outside as well, but most of our neighborhood kids are either older or younger by a few years so he doesn't have quite the same connection.  Plus, he has my fair skin so he stays pink and freckled.  

So here I am, evil Mommy Dearest that I am, trying to pull my kids in for just a fraction of a school day, for work they should already know how to do.   Instead I am getting complaints, questions galore, and a steady stream of whining. 

"How do I do this again?"
"Mmm-ooo-mmm!  Come help me with this!"
"I don't remember ever learning this, what is this?"
"But my friends are knocking, can't I do this after dark?"

Still, after a week, it's getting easier already.  They wake up ready to get to their work after breakfast.  If they finish, the rest of the day is theirs.  It's all coming back to them, and they're getting excited about the confidence they feel after refreshing their brains, and even more excited about the prospect of new and challenging material.  I'm getting into the swing of devoting more of my precious personal time planning and grading and coaching.   

We've got almost 2 weeks before we start school for real, and we're going to be ready.  

How do you prepare for the new school year?