Making Our Way

One month in and we're already revamping our homeschool agenda and schedule a little bit. I always try to remember that we are free to do that, and that it can make all the difference in our experience, productivity, and enjoyment of our learning. 

As usual, I had way too much crammed into the plan for this first half of the school year. Unfortunately, our Mini-Courses (electricity, cooking, sewing, woodworking, poetry, body science, etc…) had to be put aside for the year. Fortunately, they will be fun, hands on, continued learning to conquer over the summer together. 

Once all is said and done, without Mini-Courses, we are actually doing about 5+ hours of school a day. And that is surely enough. I had forgotten how much learning goes on outside of the classroom. My memory is being refreshed as we get further into reforming our home, life, and schedule back to the way things used to be. 

I love that you have football, piano lessons, fall fitness, ice-skating, technology, and often even larger art projects during times you would consider "after school". It's amazing to me what you can get done and be included in without tiring or getting bored of learning time. 

While we've also taken out the style of writing class we have been using for years, we didn't just take away from our schedule - we did make room for more of the good stuff too! 

Diving back into the Bible with you has been incredible. Your ability to memorize things is crazy good. And with the many different resources we are drawing from this year in Bible studies, Window on the World, History and even your church group on Sundays, it's been awesome to see how they have all correlated with one another, unplanned, and totally Holy Spirit led. 

We've also incorporated memory work and a great, homemade timeline for History and Bible. 

Lastly, I am loving to learn right next to you all the more this year after spending a year without that unique part of HS, and with the material being two grades up from our last year together. It seems we have our best days when we take it slow, enjoy our time, cuddle and take in short video lessons, listen to music, take a walk outside on a break, snack, and make more spontaneous decisions about our direction. Even though those days take us closer to 4pm than 1pm, I often wonder why we don't always take our time. It seems like on our tightly scheduled days we hurry up to wait. There's nothing in our life we'd rather do than this - so why not savor it and make it last?