I realize it has been almost a year since I've written anything. I guess, again, that I've been a little busy. Trying to homeschool with 4 small children is a bit time consuming. I read these other blogs by women who have kids galore, they have a blog business and they homeschool. I don't know how they do it!
So, what inspired me to write this time? I love schedules and seeing how other people do their homeschooling. They give me ideas. So I thought I would share what our days look like so others might find something useful or might be an encouragement to someone who has never homeschooled to see what it can be like. I also wanted to add the less glamorous aspect of being at home all day with your kids. I do love it but it is hard and real life happens and tempers flare and kids have bad attitudes. I feel like in a lot of blogs I read, this is missing. It makes it seem like life is as if in a hazy photograph with the sun shining in brightly on cheery faces, with no messes or bad attitudes, following a perfect schedule, all sitting quietly around a table. Well, that is just not the way it is here. It is beautiful and when it is all said and done, I love it, but it is messy!
So here is a little about how I'm doing things this year. Last year I used mostly a Charlotte Mason philosophy. However, over this last year I have been greatly inspired and influenced by several other types of educational philosophies, all of which have some things in common. Those are the book Teaching From Rest, the philosophy of Raymond and Dorothy Moore (and this) and schools in Finland (yes, that one is a bit odd, but after reading about their philosophy and the great success they've had, it seems to fit well with the other philosophies I like and greatly influenced how I'm conducting our homeschool this year), and, most recently, minimalism. This works out so that we have a morning circle time which includes prayer, singing, poetry, scripture memory and calendar review (including graphing weather at the end of the month and singing songs, coloring sheets and reading books and poetry about the seasons, months and days) unit studies (which brings in the history and science), phonics, math, copywork/handwriting, narration (tied to unit studies). We also try to do some picture study, music, drawing occasionally, art, handiwork, cooking and geography. We don't get it all in each week, but we get most of it. The ones that get neglected the most are handiwork and geography. I started out trying to do French too, but I ditched it for now. Just too much. We will listen to French songs from time to time though.
The way we homeschool is very much a work in progress and honestly, after each day I ponder how I could tweak this or that to make it work better. I try to schedule things too much I think and get frustrated almost everyday when things don't go according to the schedule. Today, I realized that a great deal of learning is happening anyway and that I need to not be quite so regimented about the schedule. And I also reminded myself that whatever schedule I have needs to have a great deal of margin in it to account for the barely-toddler girl in our midst who crawls through the middle of our phonics lesson and then climbs on a kids chair and falls on her head! :(
The demographic of our homeschool is one bouncy, silly boy - 7.5, one quiet detail-oriented, pattern loving boy - 5.5, one butterfly of a girl who flits and twirls and sings through life - 3.5 and one squishy, marshmallowy girl 13 months who loves to examine things and crawl all over everything.
I've taken notes of several of the days that we've homeschooled. So I've posted the first one here in the next post.
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