Just Another Homeschool Mama

Nov. 18, 2008

Ist Entry

A little about me. I've been married for almost 19 years. We have 7 wonderful children. kayley 15, Dani 13, Juli 9, Alex 6, James 5, Ryan 3, and Megan 2. Our lives are pretty chaotic most of the time but I wouldn't change it if I could. We have a farm with too many animals to list. You name it, we have it have had it. Almost.

We don't have a garden of any kind because I KILL plants!!! Plants see me and shrivel and die!!! I keep trying to talk DH into planting one but he hasn't done it yet.

We've been homeschooling for over 6 years. In that time I have tried many, many currics. And ways of homeschooling. From unschooling to school-at-home. I have finally taken a plunge and bought the one curric I have looked at over and over. SONLIGHT!!!! I am using SL 6 with Kayleyand Dani. The rest will be doing SL 3 if the book ever gets here!!! I bought it used and plan on buying a few books at a time. But next year I am buying it new and from Sonlight! I simply don't have the time or energy to keep making up curric and figuring out what we will do from day to day. I've been doing THAT for a long time now.

We use Saxon for math. Again, we've tried a lot of math. Teaching Textbooks, Abeka, Miquon, Key to..., Math-U-See, Making Math Meaningful, etc. Saxon is really the only thing I have found that has enough review and makes sense.

I'm using Saxon Phonics with Juli, Alex, and James. I like that it tells me what to do and has almost everything there. No more looking for books, activities, worksheets, etc. Just do what the lesson says. I need that at this point in my life.

We've done a lot of lapbooks and while I LOVE the way they look after, I don't think my kids have learned much at all from them. Which really stinks because they look so dang COOL!!!

So, I'm sticking with Sonlight. Ever since I made that decison I have felt such relief!!! It's like God was answering my prayer, I was just too stubborn to hear. I like that everything is laid out for me. I am tired of library fees (who can ever get those books back on time??), trying to add movies, adding real books to boring textbooks, thinking about what would make this more intersting, etc. My little kids like hands-on stuff but it takes me longer to get the stuff together than it does for them to DO the stuff. I will still let them do some hands-on things but I'm done making myself crazy over it.