The first one (and these aren't in any particular order just as they come to me) is my job. I am so grateful for my job as a Homeschool teacher. For as long as I can remember I have wanted to be a teacher because I love to teach and watch people's eyes light up when they understand something. After becoming disillusioned with teaching in public school with my experience there I thought maybe I am not meant to be a teacher. But after trying out some other career choices and then coming back to tutoring I discovered that I did indeed love education I just needed to go down a different avenue then what I had original thought. That lead me to be a home school teacher.
I never would have imagined that this would be the course that I would be on. When I was younger I actually was not fond of homeschooling at all and thought it was horrible. (I have repented of those thoughts and actually have made a complete 180 now.) But what God knew and I didn't all along was that this is where I need to be and what I need to be doing. And I love it. It is so totally me! I adore being a homeschool teacher because all the reasons why I got into education like seeing the spark of understanding and making a difference I can accomplish without all the other stuff that teachers have to deal with. (Sorry I did not intend this to be a soap box on teaching.) Anyway, I love it and feel extremely grateful that God was so good to lead me through some rather confusing waters to get me to this point! Thanks God! I knew there was a job out there for me even though all my friends thought I was crazy for quiting my job without a plan of what to do. You had a plan and I knew that. Thanks for giving me just enough of that plan at a time to get me to this point. (Isn't God amazing like that? I certainly think so.)
Anyway, all that is to say I am grateful for my job, very grateful! And I thought I would share one of the fun things that we did at school one day. The student I teach (for the sack of the blog we shall call him Rex as in T- Rex) loves arcade games. So I decided to do a little project with Rex to motivate him to behave well.
Have you seen Cane's Arcade? Well, if not then you are really missing out and need to watch it now. Go ahead, I'll wait for you.
Tissue? No? Me neither. (sniffs and clears throat) Pretty cool isn't it. I decided to make this more than just the video and encourage Rex to learn from Cane so I decided to have him make his own arcade game out of cardboard. Rex is only 5 so he isn't quite as advanced as Cane but I really liked the idea he came up with.
He loves space so his idea was to make an astronaut that you have to weave through the solar system. As we were working on it he changed his ideas around a little bit. This is what we ended up with.
Such a pretty arcade game!
Here's a close up. You can see the sun in the middle with the other planets orbiting around it. (And no they are not in order if you are trying to figure out which one is which (And yes we did include Pluto even though it was kicked out of the planet club because we are Friends of Pluto.)) That is Jupiter at the bottom right and you can almost see it's big red (really orange cause we had no red) spot. You can also see the awesome astroid belt through the center there.
The game was that you take the astronaut (isn't he so cute!)
that is attached to the string and have to manover him through space
to the hole in the bottom.
Then you drop it down and whatever prize the astronaut touches first is the one you win.
While this game was very cute we quickly discovered that it was just way too easy. Everyone got a prize everytime they played and the game lasted about 5 seconds so we decided we needed to make it more challenging and fun to play. We decided to put the prizes inside the box and then use the astronaut to knock the prize down the hole.
The only problem with that was that our astronaut being made out of cardboard was too light to knock the prizes down the hole. Our solution was to add a hook made out of a paper clip and marbles to add weight.
It worked wonderfully well. We then had a new game to play all day for the next week! Hooray.
It was a very fun project that we both enjoyed working on.
See? Don't you think I have the best job ever? Well, you don't have to think so but I do and that's what counts.
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