Homeschool Valentine's Day

One of the reasons why I wanted to homeschool is Valentine's Day. In 7th grade I was the new girl in a Lutheran School for the first time, previously I had attended public school. One of the boys gave me a Valentine that said, "To my sexy girlfriend". I will admit this boy was cute but he was shorter than me. I don't know if he gave it to me or someone else did and signed his name. But either way soon the whole class knew and both of us were teased and laughed at for several months after that. Experiences like that made me realize how horrible middle school girls are to each other, even in the parochial schools. I thought it was a girl problem but Ram said it was also bad for boys in middle school. We may send our boys to high school, but we plan to do everything possible to homeschool the Lambs at least until they are done with middle school.

When I taught at a classical Lutheran school, the headmaster required us to have class parties like Valentine's Day during recess and not during educational time. His point was that if you add up all the class parties through the year then the students were missing out on valuable educational time. That got me to thinking about my bad experience in 7th grade. We shouldn't have spent any class time exchanging Valentines by the time we were in middle school. If you would add up all the time I wasted worrying about what the other kids in middle school thought about me, I could have read several books during that time.

The last couple of years we helped with our church preschool Valentine's Day parties. This year Lamb 3 is at home for homeschool so we didn't need to help the preschool. I do want the Lambs to grow up with good memories of holidays like Valentine's Day. I do want their memories to be fun and centered around the family. This is important to me since they won't have memories of class parties on Valentine's Day.

So the Lambs woke up to these treats at their place at the table:
(I don't know which they liked better-the candy or the paper airplane Valentine that they could make! Also, the Lambs love candy canes so it was more than just using leftovers from Christmas.)

Lamb 1-Pirate Valentine

Lamb 2-John Deere Valentine
(Lamb 1 tried telling me he needed a drink in the middle of the night so he could go peek at the surprise, but I woke up enough to realize his trick and told him to go back to bed and he was not allowed to go downstairs. I knew what he was up to after Christmas stockings!)

Lamb 3-Pooh Valentine

After breakfast I planned a fun activity before we began our school work. When I taught in the classroom we did this math activity with candy hearts. We counted how many were in a box and graphed them by color. In 6 years of teaching I never had so many problems/questions as I did with the Lambs. Ram says it is because they aren't trained to sit in a seat and do their work without asking questions. I think it is because Lamb 1 is 2 years older than my students in the classroom but I don't know what was wrong with the other two. I wasn't sure we were going to complete this activity that was supposed to be fun!

Lamb 1 refused to use crayons because he thought they were babyish.

Lamb 2 complained that he didn't get any yellow hearts-I can't help there weren't yellow ones in his box! I can think of a few students in the classroom that would have done this too.

Lamb 3 did his work without complaining until he realized one of his green hearts was deformed.

When I taught in the classroom then I had them write sentences using some of the words on their candy hearts and adding in a few words to make a complete sentence. I started to help Lamb 2 do this but they were all so done with this activity that was supposed to be fun. We quit then and we'll try the sentences next year. I did buy boxes of candy hearts on clearance today so I'm prepared for next year.

I'll blog about our Valentine's Day dinner as a family next time.