The last couple of school weeks have not been easy for us.  I'm talking specifically about structured school.  Nature study and other non-textbook studies are always easy, but anything which requires sitting at a table and focusing has been truly disasterous.

Perhaps it's been the distraction of the beautiful weather and longing so much to be outside all the time, or the noise of the large construction equipment working at building a new house next door, but I'm thinking it's both those things and just plain needing a break from the structured schedule.  As it is we limit our structured learning to the morning hours, but it seems even thats been too much lately.  And instead of Mom doing as she should and reading the signs, I've been fighting it and making us all quite miserable.

The truth is I've been just as distracted as they've been, but just too stubborn to want to give up the schedule before my planner says it's time.  Yesterday and today, we all met our breaking point and we've been heavy into spending most of the day working through our ugliness.  So, beyond the talking and tears another lesson has been learned....Learn when to let go.

Oh, that's such a hard one for me!  I'm an insufferable control freak!  I know this is really surprising perhaps, but the Lord has done great work on me this last year to let go the way I have been with nature study and other things; and just let my children learn at a more natural pace for them.  You see, somewhere in my perfect worldly dreams I wanted to see my children being scholarly, book smart, able to pass all the tests with flying colors as everyone around me stood cheering and clapping for how "intelligent" they are.  For unfortunately this is how the world measures success.  I am so ashamed  that I have thought this way!  For this is NOT God's measure of success.

God blessed me with two very unique children who are full of wonderful talents and abilities and simply amaze me with these things every day.   And over the years, He has gradually taught me to let go of these preconceived, world taught ideas of what makes a person successful.  And start using His truth to measure our successes.  We are always progressing, in some ways astronomically and in others at a much slower pace....but always progressing.

Admist the turmoil, we've still be having fun outside.  I'll be posting soon about all our wonderful "hands-on" fun learning about dandelions; while we take a much needed earlier than planned break from structured studies.

We're still enjoying our new found freedom in homeschooling!  Today, while I admit the children's attitudes needed a LOT of adjustments, we still had a pretty good day.  Because I wasn't feeling the pressure that I couldn't take time to deal with those attitudes effectively.  So the biggest theme of today was what I've started calling "Behavioral Management Training"!  I'm sure I'm not the only one to have coined that title.  But, anyways it deserves a spot on my children's record keepers just as much as math does!

I stated in a previous post that this new focus in homeschooling was freeing up more time to do things we've always wanted to spend more time on.  I say "we've" because funny thing is that I've wanted this as much as the kids.  And on top of that, my husband announced last night that our new focus is VERY exciting to him as well.

I've actually been taking the time again to read aloud enjoyable chapter books on a frequent basis.  No kidding,  only on a rare occasion were we finding time for that before.  Since the movie will be coming out soon, we've begun reading The Spiderwick Chronicles, and my daughter won't hardly let me stop reading for the excitement, and I have to agree with her.  We've already finished Book 1 and will be starting Book 2 tomorrow.  It has been such pleasure to see her eyes light up  (and my son's too) when I'm reading.  And today I made a list of unfamiliar words as we read and then had my daughter use those to look up them up in the dictionary and use them in sentences.

Of course I had to have the discussion with them that although we're loving the way Mom is doing things now, we still have to do some things that they may find unenjoyable, life is just like that, sometimes we have to do things we don't enjoy or like.  And of course as I said that my daughter grunted out "Math, yuck" and my son followed with "Writing, yuck".  Oh well, definitely can't make it all fun all the time, no matter what you do!  Although my daughter definitely likes that I'm doing more "Living Math" and not worrying about finishing all of the Saxon textbook!

Because of this new focus, I have updated my record keeper into a more "journal-like" form, calling it "Education Journal".  It's where I'm writing down in as much detail as time will allow, almost everything educational the kids are doing.  In case your interested I've posted this file in my "Files to Share" list.  The "blank" file is just that, a mostly blank place to either hand-write to type out all their doings.

I've also posted the education journals that I kept for my children for this week to give an idea of how I'm keeping it.  Both of their journals are in one file, but under seperate spreadsheets (tabs) within the file.  I'm choosing to keep everything typed right now because I'm near my computer during the day and keep the file on the desktop for easy access.

So far I'm loving this method of keeping track; no check boxes, no expectations, just a place for me to journal what we do.  I'm training my eyes and ears to stay open to noticing when my children are engaging in something/anything educational, such as when my daughter takes her camera out on the deck to take pictures of birds, or my son pretends to be a firefighter and installs and elaborate paper fire alarm system in the house!

The only problem with this paper fire alarm system is it's very touchy.  Every time I cook in the kitchen, it's goes off!   Hmm, reminds me of our old house.

We had another wonderful day of learning around here!  I'm really loving this.  I think I'm just starting to truly understand this:

Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.  Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.  - Deuteronomy 6:4-9

Since I've stopped to take the time to listen to my children and teach them at every possible natural opportunity, I'm simply in awe of how many opportunities the Lord has given me to talk about Him to them.  Wow!  The Lord truly touched our hearts today so much.  We had an awesome "God Moment".   This morning Alex and I sat and read through a book called Who Likes the Snow? by Etta Kaner.

This was an absolutely awesome book for teaching just about everything you'd want to know about snow and the science behind it all.  It was very educational and at the same time fun to read.  Each page included a question about snow such as "I wonder why snow is white?" and then you'd lift the flap to read the answer.  The answer for this question in particular was of course that the crystals act as tiny mirrors and reflect white light.  Well this lead us to discussing about rainbows and God's awesome creation and how beautiful the light is that gets reflected from the water droplets in a rainbow.  And we listed all the colors in the rainbow and discussed how could anyone not believe there was a God.  And Alex commented on how long it had been since we'd seen a rainbow.

Well, wouldn't you know it...two hours later the sun peaked for only about 5 minutes after raining and I heard Alex yelling "Rainbow Mom!"  We all ran out the front door to a perfect view of a beautiful rainbow!  I grabbed my camera as quickly as I could.

I will never forget the look on Alex and Hannah's face!  I said "God put that there for us today!"  We all felt as if God had purposefully reached down and touched our lives today.  It was also a sign for me that our homeschooling is heading in the right direction at last!

Here is a list of what we did (for fun) today:

Alex -

• Read the book to Mom "Who Likes the Snow?" - Had lot of great snow and science discussions and discussed God's intricate designs and beauty in nature
• Played with Gabby under an umbrella on the deck in the spring-like rain
• He went online to WeatherBug and pretended to be a weather man and used Mom as the audience (he amazes me with how acurately he portrays them!).  I used this time to teach about wind chill factor vs. actual temperature, had a great geography lesson using one of the weather maps, and discussed directions (sw, nw, se, sw)

Both Kids -

• Played a game of "Life" with Mom.  Alex was the banker for part of it
• Exercised with Mom.  We discussed the health benefits of exercise to the body
• Dad is getting ready to read a chapter from "The Spiderwick Chronicles" Book 1 to them

Hannah -

• Gave Gabby bath, and got her ready for the day
• Taught Gabby using blocks and read book to her
• Read Chapter 2 of "Jedi Quest"
• Did Saxon Math 6/5 Lesson #63 Mental Math and Lesson Practice Only
• Read Bible Devotion, looked up verses, and had great discussion with Mom
• Played on keyboard making up her own music for 45 minutes
• Cooked dinner for family - Beef Stir Fry with Rice - Mom helped very little
• Did Blog entry about fixing dinner

Ever since my son came out of the hospital, I've been re-evaluating my methods of homeschooling.  I realized that even when he was in the hospital, learning was happening.  We had many great educational conversations about many different things.   We also read books that the wonderful people at the hospital would bring into us.  And some great and heartfelt conversations about God happened.  So why, after we got home, was I still feeling so guilty about not keeping those textbooks up?  I knew at this point there'd be no way I could catch up by the end of the year.  And once again, that would mean I wouldn't be able to "finish" what we "needed" to.  This would be the third year in a row I've laid claim to that defeat!

As I said in a previous entry, going through life-changing experiences like we did, really helps put things into perspective.  I've always been a critical and "out-of-the-box" thinker, so why was I letting this textbook thing control me?  Well, I feel step-by-step since being home, I'm starting to come out from under that gray cloud.  I'm realizing that while there has to be "some" texbook stuff, why have I been discounting all the wonderful life living and learning things that happen throughout our days.  If fact, I'm starting to think those learning experiences are the ones that make a more solid impact on our children's present and future lives.

I'm noticing that once I take my undivided attention off keeping a strict academic schedule, my children are more free to ask, think and say things, and I can use those moments for teaching.  Before, I could be so driven by keeping the boxes check marked and being sure we could get to the end of the book by the end of our school year, that I feel for sure I've missed loads of opportunities for natural learning.  Just a handful of  examples would be that we've had more time to bake, more time to teach household responsibilities, more time for discipline training, more time for games, more time for reading books, more time for laughter, and more time for deep conversations in front of the fireplace.  I'm loving it!

While I'm still figuring out the balance of things, I feel I'm really onto a revolution in our homeschooling philosophies.  Throughout the day, I've been keeping a learning journal of all the things the kids are doing that is natural learning.  This has been eye-opening to see what wonderful things can happen when I'm listening for opportunities to direct them into natural learning.  Notice I say direct them...I know that if I let my kids run wild while I go and do whatever I want, I'll end up with a disaster on my hands!  I have to be involved in directing them into something, and then be willing to take time to chase the "rabbit trails" of learning as they present themselves.  So there still has to be a basic routine or outline to the day, just not something that's set in concrete and bolted down to the completion of checking boxes and keeping textbook schedules.

Here's a great example of this from our day today:

A good friend of mine and I came up with a great plan to get some library time with our older kids!  We both have toddlers and have a terrible time going to the library with them and the older kids.  Taking a toddler just by themselves I'm sure wouldn't be so bad, but if you have to take older siblings with the intent to do some learning, well that, doesn't work.

So we came up with a plan to switch off babysistting our toddlers each week so that we could take our older children to the library and have some school time.  We worked it out where each of us could go every other week.  Today was my day, and it went great!

Here is what each of my kids did just during those three hours:

Alex

• Picked book out to read to me
• Asked questions about his surgery, we found a book on the Human Body and looked it up and read about the Appendix and had a great discussion about what happened to him (more detailed that we'd had before)
• Found a dictionary and looked up the word "appendix" and had him to copywork of the definition
• Did computer math games on the internet
• Gathered lots of loose change from my wallet and had him count up different amounts and write those down
• He wanted a book on weather, so we found one and he observed detailed pictures of snowflakes and we had a great conversation about God's beautiful one of a kind design

Hannah

• Picked out and read in a chapter book
• Read One Grain of Rice and did math activity
• Pick out poetry book and read poems
• Did copywork of poem for notebook

After our library venture, we went out for a quick but special lunch and had some more time for conversations.