Homeschooling while moving

We are moving in 7 weeks. Actually, 48 days from today. But who's counting?

Homeschooling while packing and getting ready to move is challenging. I won't say impossible, because deep down I am an unschooler and I know that my kids learn a lot whether they are sitting down for "lessons" or not. But my kids are young enough that they still need to learn the basics; they can't unschool their math facts or punctuation or grammar. And so much of our homeschooling depends on me as the main reader. These are the rare times I wish I could just flag down the schoolbus and send them off for the day. Not because they hinder me in my work, but because they are not getting any real schooling.

But they can read on their own now too. E has read a lot of "girl books" (the American Girl "Felicity" series, among others) to go along with our history time period. J has read a few (GIC version of Last of the Mohicans, some others), but he's a restless reader unless it's something "science-y" and prefers to do something, even if that means messing around on the computer. And, sometimes he's just lazy. (Well, so am I.) The upheaval doesn't help either. They don't want to move, and they are afraid.

We're also supposed to be working on a project for our homeschool group's student showcase. It's going to be about Pennsylvania, since that's where we are moving. But no one really feels like working on it, and it takes up a lot of my time to direct them. So I think "tomorrow we'll get to it" but then tomorrow is here and I have a new moving-related task.

I've been wanting to have them do some book reports, but have failed to get on that. Book reports are a great way to produce some work. Read a book, report on it. Easier said than done with reluctant writers, of course. I haven't found a book report form that I like. There are lots of forms on the 'net but all are flawed in my opinion. So I need to make up my own. Writing a book report serves many "language arts" purposes: handwriting, grammar, punctuation, creative writing. When I was a kid, this was called "English." What was wrong with that?

So you see I have lots of excuses - I mean, good reasons - why I'm not getting any homeschooling done. It's just easier to send them outside.