I have been homeschooling our oldest child now for three years. In that time, I have, unfortunately, had a lot of trials and errors, as far as how we run home school in our home, and the curriculum we have chosen. When looking back on it I have come across some reasons why things have not worked for us. This post deals with how I failed had to reexamine home school life in our house and decide what was not working and why and the changes I made to start making things work for us and get that “ah ha moment” of home school bliss.
1. OVERWHELMED:
With all the research I did on choosing curriculum and teaching styles often I became overwhelmed by all the choices. I wanted to do it all. I did not want my daughter’s education to suffer because we did not do some intracranial part or we didn’t do everything that everyone else was doing. I wanted to do sight words, lap books, work boxes, thematic units, science experiments, and detailed craft projects. The list was endless. I soon realized that I was doing a lot of prepping and planning and even sometimes just doing the “project” myself because it was not turning out or it was too difficult for her age.
I had to cut somethings out and focus on what was important to us for our school experience. The reading/phonics program I had chosen included sight words. It included sight words when it was appropriate in the grand scheme of reading. I no longer wanted my daughter just to memorize words, but grasp them naturally in reading, and she has. She’s reading a little beyond the level of the reading program we us which is fine, because I am instead creating a strong foundation for reading that I feel is important for her in the long term.
2. REMEMBERING ITS NOT A RACE
Because I was overwhelmed by choices, I often forgot how old Mouse was. A lot of things were out of her skill level as a five-year-old and as a six-year-old. We had twelve years of school to fill not three. Because I wanted to do everything, I was using a lot of programs she just was not ready for. I also wanted to match her to her peers, which pushed her perfectionist personality to points of fits and tantrums that caused turmoil in our day.
I should not be expecting some of things out of her that I was. This is where I sat down and wrote out a timeline of goals over the course of the course of her school career. This helped me to narrow down the curriculum and topic choices that were then more age appropriate for her. It also let me see that we would get to do some of the things I was so excited for, eventually.
3. REINVENTING THE WHEEL
I knew how I wanted school to look for us in my mind. Mounds and mounds of glorious books, projects, a general love of all tings learning. For the most part we had that, but I did find again that I was losing all my time to planning and creating things, that I wasn’t able to enjoy our time together during school or even after school time was done for the day. I was trying to stay a step ahead, but that often meant I was still printing things out prior to the start of our school day or planning at the last minute.
I began to loof for things that fit within the vision I had for our home-schooling adventure. I no longer felt that I had to control all of it and on top of that create it all from scratch. I saw that in most cases someone else had already done that job for me. I could concentrate my planning efforts on enrichments and other things, and be more free to be Momma the rest of the day.
4. NOT ALWAYS LISTENING TO MY CHILD
One time I removed something from our routine that I thought wasn’t working well for us, only to find out it was one of the things my daughter enjoyed the most. Several weeks had gone by and she point blank asked me why we weren’t doing it and that she really liked it and wanted to continue. I believe in following the lead of a child to a degree. Granted if it’s not appropriate and had she thrown a tantrum about it we wouldn’t have done it. I needed to take into consideration and times what she liked to do.
5. SPACE
We travel currently 70-80% of the time in our camper and the other 20-30% we are in my in-law’s home. Both home bases offer us little storage space for something like a work box system to work for us or to dedicate an entire space to a home school room like I had.
I needed to be mobile, and I need it all to make sense in transporting it all. Not everything travels well or makes sense to travel with. Now, I am still working this out and I take less and less as we travel more, and I hope to one day share what is working for us, but I’m not there yet.
Originally Posted February 2018