I'm soooo not an unschooler...or a relaxed homeschooler (do I seem relaxed to you? LOL). And yet, it seems we are sort of wading in the gentle waves of the homeschooling sea. Books have been ditched, rabbit trails are being followed, and who knows where we'll end up? We don't really seem to be following anything right now.

I hand Dd(7) a short math worksheet with 12 subtraction problems, with 6 being the largest number. She gets half of them wrong. She added on some. And she even had the MUS blocks at her disposal. The good news is, if they were addition problems, they would be 100% correct. Good thing we've got that addition thing licked. So an interesting discussion kicks up about what would happen if 3-2 became 2-3. I draw a numberline with negative numbers. Dd is interested and follows along. Later, she comes up with some negative problems of her own. Amazingly, she can figure out negative numbers in her head. Weird.

Dd(5) absolutely will not listen to my grandiose teaching scheme which demonstrates tens and ones. Why not? Its fun. We bundle pencils. I even try making tens and ones HORSES. It's not that she doesn't get it, its that she's not THERE, that isn't her interest right now. Nope, she is dwelling in counting-ville. She loves to count. She asks about calendars. She asks about clocks. She asks about thousands and millions and billions. She tells me what 10 + 10 is, and 100 + 100, and 2 + 2. She went on a nature walk with her daddy and brought home fall leaves. She arranged them in order from smallest to biggest and then counted "first, second, third, fourth, fifth". She counts the lanes at the store, and asks about numbers that she sees everywhere. But no, we won't listen to Mom and her "tens and ones" speech.

Dd(7) liked spelling better than any other topic. But eventually she stopped listening to Mom-the-Teacher doing her "phonogram" speech. Which meant she started getting the words wrong. Which meant she now hates spelling and writes sentences that read "This page is stoopid". At least its phonetic. She cries and begs and pleads, "please let me read stories. I want to read. I can learn how to spell by reading, really I can!" And she's probably right. She probably can learn to spell by seeing the same words in her favorite stories. At least at this early stage of learning. I cave. Ok, let's read books. We did come to an agreement, however; for handwriting, she can copy a sentence from her favorite book. I drew up a Perfectly Martha copywork page for her and it has a cute picture of Martha the talking dog on it saying "Soup". She was thrilled. We'll see how long this lasts...

But what all this means is, my school books have been shelved! For now, at least. I'm starting to loose faith in the whole "buy my program and you'll have perfect homeschooled kids" schemes out there. Let's hope I'm not completely going off the deep end here. Afterall, there's standards to maintain, and anti-homeschoolers to impress. Most likely, however, I'll wake up one day soon and say "what on earth am I doing?" and I'll feel behind and pressured. I'll buy Abeka, the complete $500 kit, and then tie my children down to their chairs. I'll crack the whip and make sure the blanks are filled in, by golly! And it'll last about a week, and then I'll cry, and they'll cry, and it'll start all over again.

*Disclaimer: unschoolers aren't bad. Abeka isn't bad. It's all good if it works for you and your family. I really do have "Abeka" type of days. And I have "unschooler" type of days. Hopefully it all balances out and my kids aren't psychologically scarred by it for the rest of their lives:) Its called "a well rounded education" right?