http://www.myjoyfilledlife.com/2015/04/10/4-reasons-not-homeschool-room/
Good reasons!
Thursday, August 13, 2015
Thoughts and link
I'm trying to get going, finishing our history/geography curriculum and cleaning and scheduling before we start. I found this on Pinterest today:
Saturday, August 1, 2015
End of Summer Blues/Panic/Insanity
It's August! AUGUST. That means our school year starts a month from now. We're waiting until September (or August 31st because it's a Monday; I haven't decided yet). I have my list of school materials priced and as the deadline looms for what I've been seeing as the beginning of my "official" homeschooling job, since we're starting Kindergarten, I'm tempted to pitch it all.
I want to start the year with shiny new supplies, with crisp books, with everything ready ahead of time. I want to.
But I'm also having second thoughts about committing to curriculums, to buying stuff we might not need, etc. I have a hard time, often, distinguishing between what is a worthy cause-- then I end up spending money on stuff we don't need and never getting things that would have been immensely helpful.
I've been listening to podcasts about homeschooling this summer and really thinking about what I want our school to look like, how our days will work. Some of my summer goals didn't happen. We've gotten behind or slack in areas I didn't even anticipate.
I want to have a good and right focus and I feel like it's so tempting to focus on the peripheral stuff at the expense of the core things, because the core things are simple and less shiny. Right now, the only thing that's even making focusing on the "core" stuff sound "exciting" to me is just purely the challenge of minimal living.
So, I'd love your thoughts on what's necessary and beneficial in a school day.
My pricing list right now includes:
a big world map
an Usborne History book
handwriting curriculum
next two volumes (one year) of math curriculum
Bible study
golf-size pencils
We already have: popsicle sticks, pebbles for counters, plastic bear counters, binders, tabbed dividers, rest of kindergarten math curriculum, some Bible study stuff, crayons, reading curriculum, a library card.
I want to have things "perfect" before school starts-- organized and orderly and new.
My boys have some motor skill delays-- some drawing is an option, but the Charlotte Mason "sketchpad and pencils" method is appealing to me without being great for them right now. They'll draw, but asking them to draw something in front of them is going to be a huge exercise in frustration I think, especially if we're already doing handwriting/letter forming practice.
If I scrapped my school list, which I already recognize is pretty minimal, I'd probably skip the math curriculum until we needed it and just start the year with the rest of kindergarten instead of rushing them through it in August or skipping it just because the material is repeated/reviewed in the first grade stuff. This sort of screws over my hours of work carefully plugging in math lessons in my weekly planner, but eh, those are just numbers. It's not the end of the world.
I think the thing I'm butting my head against is the forced realization that just having more detailed "to-do" list for the day doesn't mean I'm actually better at doing it. It's not a substitute for discipline. It might help a little bit, but having "lesson 57, page 109, activities 4-9" in a planner is not more helpful than just "math" when the book is already open-and-go anyway. If I was lesson planning from scratch, sure, I'd have to do that prep. But on some level, a check box is a check box, yo.
So instead of "Perfect School," I'm examining some of the things we need or want to focus on this year:
learning to read
character-building Bible study/memorization
fine motor skills (forming letters/numbers, holding a pencil, cutting with scissors)
continue to advance in math
interest-studies (human body, planets, animals)
listening to read alouds
We have our reading curriculum. If I do a little work, I could probably find topic-based Bible studies for free and we have a printer and ink. We have another six to eight weeks, probably, of math. We have bazillion books and a library card.
My dilemma right now is finishing my history/geography curriculum and deciding about handwriting. Do I get handwriting books? Or do I just get plain notebooks and work on the alphabet one letter at a time? Either way, I'm going to have to help trace or correct pencil hold, I know how to have them practice straight and squiggly lines, I can make decent block letters.
This is long and rambling. Thoughts?
I want to start the year with shiny new supplies, with crisp books, with everything ready ahead of time. I want to.
But I'm also having second thoughts about committing to curriculums, to buying stuff we might not need, etc. I have a hard time, often, distinguishing between what is a worthy cause-- then I end up spending money on stuff we don't need and never getting things that would have been immensely helpful.
I've been listening to podcasts about homeschooling this summer and really thinking about what I want our school to look like, how our days will work. Some of my summer goals didn't happen. We've gotten behind or slack in areas I didn't even anticipate.
I want to have a good and right focus and I feel like it's so tempting to focus on the peripheral stuff at the expense of the core things, because the core things are simple and less shiny. Right now, the only thing that's even making focusing on the "core" stuff sound "exciting" to me is just purely the challenge of minimal living.
So, I'd love your thoughts on what's necessary and beneficial in a school day.
My pricing list right now includes:
a big world map
an Usborne History book
handwriting curriculum
next two volumes (one year) of math curriculum
Bible study
golf-size pencils
We already have: popsicle sticks, pebbles for counters, plastic bear counters, binders, tabbed dividers, rest of kindergarten math curriculum, some Bible study stuff, crayons, reading curriculum, a library card.
I want to have things "perfect" before school starts-- organized and orderly and new.
My boys have some motor skill delays-- some drawing is an option, but the Charlotte Mason "sketchpad and pencils" method is appealing to me without being great for them right now. They'll draw, but asking them to draw something in front of them is going to be a huge exercise in frustration I think, especially if we're already doing handwriting/letter forming practice.
If I scrapped my school list, which I already recognize is pretty minimal, I'd probably skip the math curriculum until we needed it and just start the year with the rest of kindergarten instead of rushing them through it in August or skipping it just because the material is repeated/reviewed in the first grade stuff. This sort of screws over my hours of work carefully plugging in math lessons in my weekly planner, but eh, those are just numbers. It's not the end of the world.
I think the thing I'm butting my head against is the forced realization that just having more detailed "to-do" list for the day doesn't mean I'm actually better at doing it. It's not a substitute for discipline. It might help a little bit, but having "lesson 57, page 109, activities 4-9" in a planner is not more helpful than just "math" when the book is already open-and-go anyway. If I was lesson planning from scratch, sure, I'd have to do that prep. But on some level, a check box is a check box, yo.
So instead of "Perfect School," I'm examining some of the things we need or want to focus on this year:
learning to read
character-building Bible study/memorization
fine motor skills (forming letters/numbers, holding a pencil, cutting with scissors)
continue to advance in math
interest-studies (human body, planets, animals)
listening to read alouds
We have our reading curriculum. If I do a little work, I could probably find topic-based Bible studies for free and we have a printer and ink. We have another six to eight weeks, probably, of math. We have bazillion books and a library card.
My dilemma right now is finishing my history/geography curriculum and deciding about handwriting. Do I get handwriting books? Or do I just get plain notebooks and work on the alphabet one letter at a time? Either way, I'm going to have to help trace or correct pencil hold, I know how to have them practice straight and squiggly lines, I can make decent block letters.
This is long and rambling. Thoughts?
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