First, a brief recap:

We began "First Grade" with Violet the day after Labor Day.  On the day we started, Jack-Jack was 5 weeks old.  We had purchased Sonlight, the complete core 1, LA2 adv., Sci., everything, along with Singapore Math, Miquon Math, Explode the Code and A Reason For Handwriting. 

In the beginning I got the Instructor Guide out each morning, piled up the huge pile of books we would need, and sat down with Violet at the table.  The first thing I noticed was that I felt like school time was really long.  It was hard to make anything work while running around trying to corral Dash and stopping what seemed like every 5 minutes to nurse Jack-Jack.  And by the time Dash was down for his nap in the afternoon, I was so tired I couldn't see straight, much less do anything with Violet.

When I had thought about homeschooling before actually attempting it, I had imagined the children and I learning together, discovering the delights of hearing classic and wonderful stories, doing experiments, learning about the world.  But just two weeks into actually homeschooling, I was hating it.  And she was not loving it either.  To my surprise, some of the things I thought she would love were the very things she dreaded: handwriting was one of them.  We struggled and struggled.  I remember crying and telling Mr. Incredible, "I think I made a huge mistake!  I think we might have to send her to school after all."  Whenever I expressed any of these concerns to the very few homeschoolers I talked to about them, they always said the same thing, "Oh, you just had a baby.  Don't worry about it!"  But, worry I did.

Finally , Mr. Incredible stepped in.  "If the Instructor Guide is stressing you out," he said, " Why don't you just stop using it?"

STOP USING IT?  How could I stop using it?  Isn't that illegal or something?  How would it be school if I didn't do it the way the Instructor Guide said?  And one of the arguments I had used to CHOOSE Sonlight was that , "it is all laid out for me in an easy to follow plan!"  Now I was thinking of scrapping the plan.  It scared me to death, but Mr. Incredible came to the rescue again. 

"Why don't you just read the books together and learn from there?" he asked.  "You can just open the math book and do some most days and it seems like you will get it done."  "Is there something I'm missing here?"

So, feeling like a total slacker, I put the Instructor Guide away.  We used the Sonlight books, reading together, and Violet reading lots on her own.  She read, read, read, not just the Sonlight books but just about everything else she could get her hands on.  I got her math out with her and taught her the best wasy I knew how... I adore math (and pretty much every other subject, too), but Violet did not like it very much.  We actually ended up tabling the handwriting thing- I felt she just might need a little more growth in her fine motor skills before she was really ready to work on pretty handwriting.  She could write every letter, just not the way the handwriting program wanted it. 

So, effectively, we fell into the "very relaxed"/unschoolish category for our first year.  It wasn't what I had planned, just sort of what happened.  That't just the way it was, I will do my evaluation in the next post.

(I can tell these posts are going to be long!  I am sorry, and completely understand if there are no readers left by the end... but as I said before, this is something I need to do for myself to clarify my thoughts as I look towards the upcoming year.)