Posted in My Ramblings
JESUS IS COMING SOON! MARANATHA LORD!
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Hi friends, if you need to silence the music just hit the play/pause button on the player in the right sidebar, just below the black horse and the copyright notice.
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Hi friends, if you need to silence the music just hit the play/pause button on the player in the right sidebar, just below the black horse and the copyright notice.
Do this! Do that! Check this item off the list and move on to that one! Make the child sit at the table until ALL of those math problems are finished! Make him read this because it is the next thing in the book! We do not have time for the art project today, because Math, Phonics, Grammar, Spelling, and the like took too long!
What a horrible task master we have been under!
How did I get here? What is going on? Is this what want out of homeschooling? I am so tired. Frankly, I am fed up with this. Where are the leisurely nature walks? Where is the laughter? Where is the love of learning? Is my purpose in homeschooling just to get the work finished?
You can probably tell that I am that I need to make some changes in the way I home school my kids. I have been feeling burned out lately, and it seems like the joy of homeschooling is escaping all of us. To answer the questions I posed above, I will need to give a little background information.
I strongly prefer the classical model of education, so I am loosely following the course of study outlined in The Well Trained Mind by Susan Wise Bauer. Now, I knew we could not follow EVERY suggestion made in the book, but still I wanted to sort of stick to the outline, studying Ancient History and Life Science in year one, Middle Ages and Earth/Space in year two, then moving on to early modern History and Chemistry in year three, and finally finishing up with late modern History and Physical Science in Year four. Then I planned to switch to a five-year plan, using the Mystery of History series, and spreading the science out a little more to cover it in more depth. It sounded like such a wonderful plan!
Unfortunately, my two youngest kids did not master reading in preschool like Susan Wise did back in the early 1970’s when her mom Jessie was teaching her. No, my kids actually spent their preschool years doing preschool stuff… playing outside, picking flowers, running in the sprinkler, learning colors, shapes, numbers and letters, playing with play dough and doing puzzles. Even if I had wanted to teach them to read, my son’s speech was so delayed that it would not have been possible. So he started Kindergarten actually needing to do Kindergarten level work! Therefore, we had to spend a good portion of our day covering phonics and reading; this is something the schedule in the Well Trained Mind does not take into account, just as it does not take into account that your family actually has to do more than JUST homeschool. There is laundry to be done, meals to cooked, and dishes to be washed. There is church to attend and co-op classes to plan. In my home there is a High School student who needs teaching too, and there is a part time job to work at on top of all of it.
So here we were, fully half of our day being taken up just trying to master reading and math. Then we would find ourselves squeezing in History and Science when we could. It did not bother me much, and we were having fun. We did something for History each day, sometimes it was reading followed by a narration, and other times it was a History related art project, or map work, or even a cooking activity. The first year worked out pretty good, except that half way through the year we had to pick up the pace to finish our History book before summer, so we skipped extra activities on many lessons. Then the second year started, now in addition to teaching my son, my youngest daughter was ready to start Kindergarten. We moved along enjoying ourselves for the most part. Then about a month ago, I sat down and looked at where we were in our History book. We were so far behind! If we did not pick up the pace we would NEVER finish in time for summer break, in fact, we would be lucky to finish before October! So we doubled our efforts, we would read, do our narration, and then do our map work in the same day. The only “projects” we did was the coloring pages, never the more fun activities. We stopped reading the additional books on the chapter topics. We even gave up taking a couple of days here and there to review the history memory cards, and instead just pushed ahead to the next lesson.
Science was rushed along in a similar way, reading the lessons, doing the experiments, and leaving it at that. No notebook pages, no extra activities, nothing that was not absolutely necessary in order to be able to say we “did” the lesson.
We pushed along like this, and each day I felt less and less joy in what I was doing, and each day my frustration level increased. I did not blog about homeschool much during this time. Instead, I just posted photos and blogged about things like Easter egg hunts. I was so exhausted after DOING homeschool each day that I did not want to think about it afterward, let alone blog about it!
Then, last weekend I woke up, as if out of a bad dream,
and came to my senses. I looked at my children, and realized that they were as burnt out as I was. They were not having any fun, and they were not remembering much of what we were rushing so much to do. I asked myself, “Why is it so important to finish Middle Ages History this year?” Did I honestly think that my child would be asked when applying for college, “Why did it take you five years to finish the Story of World series instead of four?” Who was I trying to impress? Who decided that the grammar stage of the Trivium should last exactly four years? Who decided that learning should take place from the first week of September and stop the second week of June? From where did I get this arbitrary schedule? Would it not make more sense to take longer to cover the material, but to have my kids enjoy it and retain what they learned?
I realized that my thinking was all out of line. I had read that the last volume of Story of the World was not good for kids who were younger than 4th grade level, so I had even started making plans of other ways to cover history the 4th year. It did not occur to me that maybe I should just take more time on the first three volumes and then begin again with Ancient History in the Mystery of History series.
Therefore, I decided last weekend that I would stop this nonsense, stop being dictated to by some schedule invented by someone else in an entirely different situation than my own, and start doing what works for us.
We are still following a classical model, we LIKE that. The difference is that now we are not trying to push forward and keep to some silly schedule of when to finish with each step of that model. Instead, we are just doing what comes next. We are relaxing and enjoying our extra projects again. We are reading literature about each time period in History, just like we used to. We are doing our art projects.
We are also revamping our approach to science. Instead of boring lesson response sheets where all the kid does is answer questions, we are going to slow down on the interesting space units and slowly assemble a lap book, read library books, and try to visit our local observatory. We joined ENCHANTED LEARNING so that we would have access to lots of neat printable graphics and minibooks to put in our lapbooks.
I don’t know when we will finish the Middle ages study… we might finish it this summer, or we may finish it in November… but we WILL enjoy it!
I have many other thoughts swimming around in my brain, but I was intending to write a blog post, not a book, so I will stop now, and maybe write more some other time.
What a horrible task master we have been under!
How did I get here? What is going on? Is this what want out of homeschooling? I am so tired. Frankly, I am fed up with this. Where are the leisurely nature walks? Where is the laughter? Where is the love of learning? Is my purpose in homeschooling just to get the work finished?
I strongly prefer the classical model of education, so I am loosely following the course of study outlined in The Well Trained Mind by Susan Wise Bauer. Now, I knew we could not follow EVERY suggestion made in the book, but still I wanted to sort of stick to the outline, studying Ancient History and Life Science in year one, Middle Ages and Earth/Space in year two, then moving on to early modern History and Chemistry in year three, and finally finishing up with late modern History and Physical Science in Year four. Then I planned to switch to a five-year plan, using the Mystery of History series, and spreading the science out a little more to cover it in more depth. It sounded like such a wonderful plan!
Unfortunately, my two youngest kids did not master reading in preschool like Susan Wise did back in the early 1970’s when her mom Jessie was teaching her. No, my kids actually spent their preschool years doing preschool stuff… playing outside, picking flowers, running in the sprinkler, learning colors, shapes, numbers and letters, playing with play dough and doing puzzles. Even if I had wanted to teach them to read, my son’s speech was so delayed that it would not have been possible. So he started Kindergarten actually needing to do Kindergarten level work! Therefore, we had to spend a good portion of our day covering phonics and reading; this is something the schedule in the Well Trained Mind does not take into account, just as it does not take into account that your family actually has to do more than JUST homeschool. There is laundry to be done, meals to cooked, and dishes to be washed. There is church to attend and co-op classes to plan. In my home there is a High School student who needs teaching too, and there is a part time job to work at on top of all of it.
So here we were, fully half of our day being taken up just trying to master reading and math. Then we would find ourselves squeezing in History and Science when we could. It did not bother me much, and we were having fun. We did something for History each day, sometimes it was reading followed by a narration, and other times it was a History related art project, or map work, or even a cooking activity. The first year worked out pretty good, except that half way through the year we had to pick up the pace to finish our History book before summer, so we skipped extra activities on many lessons. Then the second year started, now in addition to teaching my son, my youngest daughter was ready to start Kindergarten. We moved along enjoying ourselves for the most part. Then about a month ago, I sat down and looked at where we were in our History book. We were so far behind! If we did not pick up the pace we would NEVER finish in time for summer break, in fact, we would be lucky to finish before October! So we doubled our efforts, we would read, do our narration, and then do our map work in the same day. The only “projects” we did was the coloring pages, never the more fun activities. We stopped reading the additional books on the chapter topics. We even gave up taking a couple of days here and there to review the history memory cards, and instead just pushed ahead to the next lesson.
Science was rushed along in a similar way, reading the lessons, doing the experiments, and leaving it at that. No notebook pages, no extra activities, nothing that was not absolutely necessary in order to be able to say we “did” the lesson.
We pushed along like this, and each day I felt less and less joy in what I was doing, and each day my frustration level increased. I did not blog about homeschool much during this time. Instead, I just posted photos and blogged about things like Easter egg hunts. I was so exhausted after DOING homeschool each day that I did not want to think about it afterward, let alone blog about it!
Then, last weekend I woke up, as if out of a bad dream,
and came to my senses. I looked at my children, and realized that they were as burnt out as I was. They were not having any fun, and they were not remembering much of what we were rushing so much to do. I asked myself, “Why is it so important to finish Middle Ages History this year?” Did I honestly think that my child would be asked when applying for college, “Why did it take you five years to finish the Story of World series instead of four?” Who was I trying to impress? Who decided that the grammar stage of the Trivium should last exactly four years? Who decided that learning should take place from the first week of September and stop the second week of June? From where did I get this arbitrary schedule? Would it not make more sense to take longer to cover the material, but to have my kids enjoy it and retain what they learned?I realized that my thinking was all out of line. I had read that the last volume of Story of the World was not good for kids who were younger than 4th grade level, so I had even started making plans of other ways to cover history the 4th year. It did not occur to me that maybe I should just take more time on the first three volumes and then begin again with Ancient History in the Mystery of History series.
Therefore, I decided last weekend that I would stop this nonsense, stop being dictated to by some schedule invented by someone else in an entirely different situation than my own, and start doing what works for us.
We are still following a classical model, we LIKE that. The difference is that now we are not trying to push forward and keep to some silly schedule of when to finish with each step of that model. Instead, we are just doing what comes next. We are relaxing and enjoying our extra projects again. We are reading literature about each time period in History, just like we used to. We are doing our art projects.
We are also revamping our approach to science. Instead of boring lesson response sheets where all the kid does is answer questions, we are going to slow down on the interesting space units and slowly assemble a lap book, read library books, and try to visit our local observatory. We joined ENCHANTED LEARNING so that we would have access to lots of neat printable graphics and minibooks to put in our lapbooks.
I don’t know when we will finish the Middle ages study… we might finish it this summer, or we may finish it in November… but we WILL enjoy it!
I have many other thoughts swimming around in my brain, but I was intending to write a blog post, not a book, so I will stop now, and maybe write more some other time.
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