Outsourcing

I have been teaching Ballet girl to read Bulgarian since she was three and a half. Now, three years later, she reads well. So yesterday, at my father’s request, I officially outsourced to my parents the week-days practices of reading Bulgarian. During the weekends I will continue to listen to Ballet Girl read. Prior to that I outsourced piano practice: during the week Ballet Girl practices under my mom's supervision, and during the weekends she and I work together. This strategy for piano has proven to work very well and I hope the reading is the next success. I plan to outsource English reading once school begins because Ballet Girl’s skills are solid in this realm as well.

Being able to outsource some of Ballet Girl's schooling activity is a tremendous relieve. In principle, I value play time and I am always reluctant to trade play for school work; in fact, I feel guilty whenever I need to pull the kids out of play time to do our homework activities, but I also strongly believe in persistence and consistency so the conflict will remain. The outcome has been that the kids are the last to leave the playground and the school work is left for the evenings when we all could be tired and moody. So, having some of the mechanical skill-practice tasks done during the day in my absence, followed by enough play time, leaves me feeling energized and confident to introduce new concepts, and to have longer discussions in the evenings through our read-alouds.

I also freed our weekends so that we can have more time to introduce and discuss new school concepts and spend the week exploring them closely.