I’ve written how last year while trying to decide on a home school curriculum that I changed what we were doing about five times. Each time getting further and further away from traditional school, getting further and further away from forcing my kid’s to sit down and learn something and getting off of my time table. Gradually I began leaning more and more towards their learning time tables, listening and watching their emotional time tables as what they are capable of doing and what they are emotionally capable often are two very different things. I was relieved going into the school year with nothing for a guide except what my kid’s were interested in and everyday I am blown away by how much learning actually gets done, not because I’m forcing them, but because they are choosing to do it!
One of the reasons I chose to skip a curriculum was based on two reasons, one I knew we would be moving, which would throw us off of and I would feel pressured to push the kid’s faster than they were emotionally able to go. Second, I also wanted to be able to spend less money on curriculum. We are using MathUSee for math and I had bought Logic of English for spelling, reading, and handwriting. I have to tell you that even though I have used LOE as a guideline and it has been a great tool to use, I find that it is working a lot like my cooking, I find multiple recipes and then make it my own. I am finding that Maddie is learning so much more about sentence structure, nouns, adjectives, spacing, and punctuation’s simply by sitting next to me and watching me journal. I have been able to show her how we write right to left, how a finger width allows us to see two words instead of having words that run together. She has begun to do copy work, not because I make her sit down and write, but because she partly sees me doing it, and partly because she is understanding that practice makes her better at something. Right now she is into anything science and most of her copy work is out of science books, which means she’s reading, doing math (because science requires math), she’s learning punctuation as she has it demonstrated to her in the books.
I honestly thought we’d be able to get back to school work a week after we moved, boy was I wrong, and I am so thankful we kept going with school through the summer. We will need to get back to a routine, because the kids thrive and do so much better when they have a routine and I do better when we have a routine. I’m still so amazed at how much kid’s really do want to learn, I’m amazed when Maddie goes to the book shelf and picks Abagail Adams and with excitement tells me how she was married to John Adam’s and then tells me a bit about the Revolutionary war. I am amazed as Naomi and Titus work on writing their letters and numbers without being told. Naomi was struggling so much with handwriting, but when I packed off and let her brain and her hands figure out how to form the letters the tears left and excitement came into her eyes again.
Life is still very crazy and we are not sure what the future holds, but I am so very thankful for the chance to see my kid’s excel and to have been given the chance to give them the experience that learning really can be fun and exciting, to give them the reigns of their learning and how much they can excel when given the chance. So very awesome!
