State of the Homeschool

Okay, I need to just face it. This whole blog devoted to homeschool thing just isn’t gonna happen. I have all of this laundry that needs to be done. And cooking. And helping out in the studio. And blogging on this blog. And, Oh Yeah…school. There’s just not enough time for a new blog. I had a whole post written yesterday where I poured my heart out about how things are going now that we are on Week 5…I can’t believe we are already on week FIVE…and then it was lost. I hate it when that happens. Oh, well, I guess we’ll just try again today.

Everywhere I go people are asking me how it’s going. I LOVE that people are so interested. I’d have to say that so far the experience has been about 95% wonderful and 5% FRUSTRATING/scary. Remember how I mentioned a few months back that Mak and I butt heads a good bit? Well, as it turns out, that aspect of our relationship did not magically vanish once we started homeschooling. Who knew? 😉 Last week we had a day that I was pretty confident one of us would not make it through. I woke up in a bad mood, he woke up in a bad mood…he would NOT focus on his work for anything which made me extremely frustrated. Things were going downhill REALLY fast. So I put a call-out for prayer for better attitudes for us both on facebook. And I immediately got encouragement and promises of prayer from lots of wonderful ladies. It’s times like that that I love facebook. We took a time-out and came back to the lesson about twenty minutes later. And all was good. One of the best things I have learned is that a time out every now and then is okay.

The number one question I get is about how long it takes. That was also my number one question to homeschoolers last year when I was contemplating homeschool. I now understand why they all had such a hard time answering. The truth is, I don’t ever feel like I’m not schooling him. I mean, he’s my kid. My life is pretty much centered around training him, whether that be about early Egyptian civilizations, Vivid Vocabulary or using his manners. It all ties together and it’s a constant thing. As far as teaching our actual curriculum, we start at 7:00 am as a family with Bible. Collin leaves to take CB to school at 7:20 and Mak and I get busy. The order that we do our subjects in varies, but we generally start with Language Arts and Creative Writing. I have learned not to make Mak read to me first thing in the morning. It’s just not his favorite thing to do and he needs to get warmed up to the day before we start that. We read, then move on to Math, and if we have time before we need to go get CB from school we do History and Social Studies. Whether or not we get that done depends on how well the reading goes. Usually we have no problem finishing with everything before it’s time to pick her up. We leave to get CB at 10:20, so all of that generally takes three hours. We come home and Mak and CB play outside until noon and then we have lunch. After lunch we do Science together…they both LOVE Science! A lot of the time my nephew Tallon also joins us for this part of the day. From that point on we are free from actual lessons until bedtime. Before bed, we read together from our chapter book as a family. This week we are reading Ginger Pye, the cutest little book about a puppy. Both kids love it. For sure Mak’s favorite parts of the school day are Math and Science. We’re not really sure where that came from. 😉

My favorite part of this whole homeschool thing is the one-on-one time I get to spend with my boy. I haven’t had that since he was 2 years, 4 months old. It’s always been Mak, Clara Beth and me. I am really loving all of this time with him. I’m truly amazed at the things he is learning. God has blessed that boy with an incredible, curious mind and I am so thankful that I am the one that gets to observe it being filled with knowledge everyday. I definitely am not ready to say that this is something we will continue forever, but for now? It’s working. REALLY REALLY well.

I haven’t been sharing a lot of our family photographs lately, so here are a few from recess yesterday. Sweet Caroline is back with us on Mondays (YAY!!) and yesterday was her first ride in the jeep! Don’t worry, the jeep was in the slow mode and her seatbelt was securely fastened at all times. And Aunt Aron was well within baby catching distance. 🙂 She had a BLAST.

I adore this image. He loves this baby girl so much!!

And then…sidewalk chalk!!! Mak will draw with chalk for about 43 seconds before getting bored and throwing it down to the ground in exchange for riding something with wheels. The girls played with it for about an hour.

Mak’s big accomplishment in his 43 seconds was a big blue blob. 😉

Acorns!! Fall is coming!!!

The look I get when he sees my camera pointed at him…

The look I get when she sees my camera pointed at her…

Mak’s hand

Hmmm…this kinda looks like the pretty stuff that Mommy puts on her lips in the morning. Maybe I should try rubbing some on my face…

Pretty lips! 😉

Sweet Caroline received her first boo-boo that required a band-aid at Aunt Aron’s house yesterday. 🙁

So, there you go. A little bit about how homeschool is going. There probably won’t be a blog devoted to it, but I do hope to keep the posts coming on this blog.