I have spent the last two years - the sum total of the time we've been homeschooling - becoming a curriculum junkie. There is SO MUCH out there that has to be waded through, and of course, being an infomaniac, I can't let a single curriculum go by without checking it out. The result of this obsession is that I can't stick with one thing long enough to get any learning into my kids! I'll see something and go, Great, That's perfect for my set of heathens, and we'll start it and get a few weeks into it and then my eye will be caught by another sparkly book with a whole new set of guidelines, and after a bit of fumbling and bumbling we'll throw out the first several hundred dollars' worth of curriculum and jump into the new one...and then a few weeks later, I see something else, or run over a great link on a webpage or a blog and I just can't keep myself from looking and the whole thing just starts over again! I have a houseful of fabulous curriculum and don't have enough kids or years left of homeschooling to use it all! And my youngest is only six! Good grief!
I know there is wisdom in being flexible - you know, if something isn't working for you feel free to change it. But I think I've taken that idea of "flexibility" to a whole new level - and it's getting expensive!
So on several occasions over the last couple of weeks, I sat down and did some real thinking about what I really want for my kids, and what drew me to homeschooling in the first place. I remember those last months the kids were in public school, and how I read dreamily about unschooling, and relaxed schooling, and Charlotte Mason, and unit studies, and lapbooking or notebooking - and a myriad of other equally great methods of schooling. It wasn't as overwhelming then, for some reason. I had a goal: getting the kids out of that government school. I had focus: getting them educated as well as I could. I had money: we sold our house that year to buy a bigger one (we looked around at where all this homeschooling would take place, and decided the front lawn in winter in Seattle just wasn't going to cut it, we needed a few more square feet!) so I could buy whatever curriculum I wanted.
Now, I am befuddled: the kids are home but I still have to go to work, and they take advantage of my distraction to do nothing. I have smaller goals: I just want to get through this next month. I have no money. At all.
So what to do? After much careful thought and consideration, I have decided that we are going to do Ambleside Online, which is free, comprehensive, and offers all of the things I dreamed about when I first undertook to homeschool. We plan to start right after our homeschool co-op gets out in early June.
Someone's gonna have to check up on me from time to time to see if I'm still doing Ambleside in 3 months....
