Well, another week finished and 11 more weeks to go! We've been at this for over 6 months now and I feel like I'm just now getting my "sea legs". Sent my mid-year review packet to my umbrella school at the beginning of the month (I know it's late, but the school was just overwhelmed by new homeschoolers this year!) and realized I wish I had known what I know now when we started back in September.
I've finally realized that I can't do everything every day. My canned curriculum had us doing ALOT of work EVERY day and not only do my boys not do well with that schedule, I don't. I finally realized that it was most important that I do the "Three R's" every day, so without fail, we do those every day and mix up the rest. Since history is mostly reading, that gets taken care of easily with reading. We take care of science our first three days of the week and let it go at that. I plan to do the "fun" science experiments when the weather gets warmer and during the summer, like planting a garden, so I'm not sweating the labwork right now.
The hardest thing to seem to fit in are the "fun" electives that the boys like to do but don't seem too important, so I've relegated them to after math and spelling on Fridays. Today they worked on www.codeacademy.com for their second lesson in HTML because they REALLY wanted to learn programming. Yep, they are our sons, geekiness and all :) Classes that only happen once a week or so, like handwriting, keyboarding (for Ben), art, music, etc, are harder to fit in and make sure they happen. I'm lucky during the school year that choir and cello practice give us a definite day to schedule it, but when we get to a foreign language next year, I'm sort of lost.
The boys are finally comfortable knowing that "school" will happen every day, will not be too painful and the sooner they buckle down and finish their work, the better. I've become more comfortable knowing that I don't have to do EVERYthing in the curriculum and it will still be enough. I still worry we are going to be pretty far behind when the school year is up, but I read enough from my school curriculum support posts to know that I shouldn't sweat it if it takes up to two years to finish this single year of curriculum. It won't take us nearly that long, but I feel better knowing I'm not alone and that I'll be so much more prepared this fall when we start our second year of homeschool. I can't believe it's already time to pick and buy my books and materials for next year-or that we're actually getting close to the end of our first year and planning on doing it again!
So, if I could talk to my "first year homeschooler" Laura self at this point, I would say, "Laura, just make sure they get their 3 R's done every day. Make sure that you are there for questions, that you work with them when they get stuck and that you have a plan for today and tomorrow. The rest will be okay and will take care of itself-you are doing great!"
I wonder what next year's Laura will have to say to me? :)
My daughter and son-in-law are giving their kids a classical education, but I don't know if they are using a certain curriculum for that or not. They study the Bible too, and memorize Bible verses. I know that it took a certain amount of decison making on their part too. One of their children has PDS. I hope I got that right: autism, but you know there are different spectrums.
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