The Best Laid Plans

It's highly likely that most all of my homeschooling buddies know my favorite, one-word answer to the question, "What is your favorite thing about homeschooling?"

Do you know the answer?  It is the one thing for me that outweighs all other general pluses of educating my family on the homestead.  Of course I love that we can freely study our bible and have God be the center of our homeschool.  I love being available to my children 24/7, and them to me.  Yes, even when they drive me batty, and I them, this is still a major bonus. Being able to provide a custom tailored education based on the interests and learning levels of my children is pretty huge as well.

There is one thing, however, that complements these big bonuses found only in home education.  Have you guess it yet?


FLEXIBILITY!


Am I the only one that embraces this humongous gift of living and learning at home?  Did you get sidetracked and forget that you run the show?  Are you caught in the daily grind?  Don't be afraid to step back and follow your instincts.  Never before has this unique attribute of home education been more appreciated and respected by me than right now; this very moment.  As each hour, day, week, month, and year goes by my appreciation of the gift of flexibility grows more and more.  With that appreciation comes my willingness to wield it with wild abandon.

We started this journey out this time around the way I've seemed to do most things since, oh I don't know, birth?!  We dove right into the frigid water of the deep end, willingly, head first.  Is there really any other way to do things?  (I know there is, but they typically elude me.)  It seems my nature is either to plan things to death and forego ever starting, OR dive right in clothes and all.  Somewhere along the line the middle ground disappeared for me.  Presuming it ever did actually exist.

We've been tooling along here at The Zoo Crew quite well with our tutelage at Royal Academy.  In the beginning we started our with a little deschooling, getting to know each other time.  It was well worth it to us on many levels to spend this quality time together, especially for our resident elementary age child coming to us from public school with a lot of emotional luggage in tow.  The toddlers, well, I'm sure you know how they are.  They learn no matter what we are doing, and they are all too happy to tag along on all of our adventures.

After everyone got settled and a little more comfortable with our new lifestyle we settled into a "canned" curriculum which we loved, and it served us well at the time. When we started out with My Father's World I thought it was going to be our thing through the end.  I mean, we really did love it, but alas I am always the rebel.

From there we etched a little closer to my eclectic heart by tossing out the "canned" curriculum and worked on areas of weakness for a while which led us into following our own version of the four-year plan laid out in A Heart of Wisdom.  As we enter back on the track we laid out for this school year, after a much needed extended break over Thanksgiving and Christmas (despite finding two of us --me included-- still sick after THREE MONTHS of illness in our home), I look longingly toward spring.  It's not the renewal of life in the growing things on our land that calls me.  It's not the warmer temperatures and the sudden downpours.  It's not the promise of animals and an abundant harvest.  I love the winter and all it encompasses.

What I look forward to is the completion of this phase in our homeschooling journey.  I look forward to closing this chapter and writing a new one.  Once spring hits, our textbooks will close, this plan will end, and a new chapter will lay blank before us.  I have different plans this time around.  The plans that lie ahead do not include the textbooks of this school year.  They may not include literal textbooks at all, unless they come upon us naturally, but we do not plan to be held captive by chapters and workbook schedules.

I am looking forward to embracing the natural opportunities for learning that exist all around us; our home, our community, our land, our family and friends.  My heart has always been eclectic with an unschooling tendency, and that is exactly where I am being led for the next season.  When I watch my four and five year old (21st and 26th of this month, respectively) learn with wild abandon despite the absence of textbooks, or sometimes in spite of their presence, I am reminded that we are all learners all of the time.  That is, unless the love of learning is snuffed out for us by false timelines and artificial learning environments.  One of our guests over Christmas, a public school student, made a statement that shook me back to my core belief system, "Why are we learning when we're not in school?"

--sigh--

It is my desire to instill a love of learning in my children so deep that there will be no compartmentalizing involved.  Living IS learning!  It is exciting.  Learning is human nature.  It took me years, in some cases over a decade, to reignite my love for certain "subjects".  I literally thought I hated (HATED) history.  Can you believe it?  History?  Boring?  Are you kidding me?  Science was right there too.  You do know just how fascinating science is, right?  I somehow managed to come out of high school with the idea that I just wasn't smart enough for science.  Did I mention that I was a honor roll student, editor of the yearbook, and student of the month?  Yet, somehow I was so diminished in this subject area that I sought outside instructors for my older homeschool graduates.  I just couldn't cut the muster, or so I thought.  Craziness!

The three students being guided into adult life at Royal Academy will hopefully be spared these difficulties to overcome.  My prayer is that they will love learning and not see it separate of living.  I long for them to embrace life and living fully with all the pitfalls and triumphs that living will surely bring.  Mistakes and victories alike will not define them.  They will merely usher them to what is next all the while providing valuable wisdom to carry forward to their next chapter.

Do you have a vision for your home school?  I would love to hear about it!

More Learning Lies Ahead

My office where all of our planning takes place.  It is also
sacrificed space.  This used to be my living room.  I have
hopes of reclaiming it within the next year.  We'll see!

It's that time of year when most of us are preparing for the up and coming school year.  We all do it, but we have our own style about it.  It doesn't matter the form of your approach to education, everything requires some forethought and effort.  Over the years what our family's approach to education looks like has changed several times.  I think we've finally arrived.  (Maybe.  Ask me again in five years.)  We are Eclectic Homeschoolers.  Isn't that a fun label?  I'm cool with it.  It's actually quite freeing to actually know WHO we are and WHAT we stand for as a family.

Aside from knowing God and gaining a more thorough understanding of the Bible our greatest goal as parents of the three youngsters we are currently raising, remember seven have gone before them, it is our greatest charge to instill them with the ability to do for themselves.  I've always believed it my job to raise my children up to live their own lives.  Never before have I viewed that calling in the exact light of which I do now.  We are not young parents.  When our young children are our age they will find themselves with very aged, quite possibly deceased, parents and not a grandparent to be seen.  They will be the elders much younger than we.  Sure they'll have their older siblings and cousins around, but they will definitely NEED to be independent, self-driven individuals.  In addition, it is my prayer that they will be community minded with a heart for their fellow man and that they will carry the wisdom to know when helping IS helping and when the best way to help someone is to step back.

The above goals are always in the forefront of my mind when I am planning their education.  This year is exciting for me in that I have found my way back to my roots.  I am back in communication with my eclectic self, and it feels nice.  With our sudden plunge back into homeschooling I enlisted the help of a "canned" curriculum.  It was great, and I planned to use it for years to come.  It felt good to not have to think so much.  It was fun to just open the book and follow the preset plan for the day.  I could prepare way in advance if I desired, or I could wing it for a day, or week or two, as needed.  The curriculum we used was simple to follow, in line with our morals, and easily alterable to suit our needs.  This I loved!

Now that all of us are getting used to living together and settling in as a cohesive family (It's been nearly TWO years!  Can you believe it?) I am feeling a bit more capable of doing my own thing.  What does this mean for me?  A lot more work is required on my part, but the outcome is so much more fun and totally worth it.  It means late nights and a lot of planning.  It means we get a customized curriculum, and I am SO into that!

I don't know about you, but I love learning about how other people do things, what resources they use, and how they put everything together to meet the individual needs of their families.  So, I thought you might enjoy a little peek into what I've been working on for my family.  I have some favorite resources to share with you and some organizational pointers.  It is my hope that you are inspired to stay the course, or take your first step, with your mission in mind.  Homeschooling is not for the faint of heart, but when we are supportive of each other the load can be lightened, and we can even have fun (a lot of fun) on the journey!

My favorite planner is by far The Well Planned Day by Home Educating Family Publishing.  Rebecca Scarlata Keliher has thought of nearly everything we need as home educating parents to plan and manage our year, and she bound it all neatly up into a convenient planner.  I've tried others in an attempt to save a dollar, but this is one area I have decided not to cut corners.  This planner functions VERY WELL as my external brain, and with perimenopause rearing it's ugly head this is a very beautiful thing!  If you're not there yet, trust me on this one.

A glimpse inside my planner clockwise from left: front cover,
month at a glance, week at a glance, and student planning page.

*There are TONS of useful bits inside this planner.  I just shared my most used pages. 

In reclaiming my status as an eclectic homeschooler I have pulled back out and put back into service my trusty three-ring binder.  Here is where I keep the materials that I am putting together for lessons and prepare the individual subjects for my individual children.  It is such a handy system and really works well for me.  I love the resources found inside the FREE Printable Planner by Britni at The Life in Bloom.  I used her planner before, and this year I pulled out some helpful pages to use in my planning binder.  I love her style, and her experience as a homeschool mom is evident with the content of her FREE planner.  It is fun to poke around her site.  There are lots of useful and fun, FREE printables to be found.

A glimpse inside my Homeschool Notebook clockwise from left:
inside front cover holds information requiring immediate attention,
I use the calendar page for a typical month-at-a-glance for each of us,
and   I use it for a typical week-at-a-glance, I use the yearly sheet to
 plan out the material covered for the year, and I use it for planning
out food preservation for the year, dividers allow me to store free
printables to be used with our subjects studied throughout the year,
and for organizing literary resources (also free) to complement books
 we read throughout the year, and the back pocket holds additional
useful resources for future planning.

The last thing in my planning arsenal is a planner for Harmony, the resident nine-year-old.  As members of the TOS Homeschool Review Crew we are being given the opportunity to review a homeschool planner for kids.  What a perfect fit!  This will be her first year using a planner and taking a little more charge of her responsibilities, both on the domestic and the educational front.  Check back in late September to see how it goes.  We will start using this planner on Monday even though we don't start our new schedule until September 8th.  I figure it will be good for her to have some practice down before we pick things up a bit.

A new method has been shared with me in regard to the approach of educating my children that seems a perfect fit.  Up until a couple of years ago The Heart of Wisdom has not registered on my radar.  In this time I have been exposed to it repeatedly.  Finally, I took a look, and I love the concept.  It seems a great fit for us as we were already naturally functioning in a similar way.  However, with The Heart of Wisdom in hand we have a blueprint of sorts.  Just like my Well Planned Day planner it serves to lighten my load.  Robin Sampson has done all the leg work for me, and I get to benefit from the fruits of her labor as do my children.  We've joined in the rotation at year four in order to align with my good friend and her place in the rotation in a hope that we may join together on occasion and share in the learning with our families.  We've not decided as to what we will do at this point, but we could do an experiment, cook a meal, do a craft or art project; the possibilities are endless.  Joining together as like minded families just serves to enhance the learning experience of our children, and creates a sense of community unlike that which I have found in any other circumstance.  We love learning together with other families!

Since it has been so many years since we were active homeschoolers before this new journey began, I find my arsenal a tad lacking at the elementary level.  No, we are not one of those homeschool families learning high school level chemistry in third grade.  This has meant that I need to evaluate my current resources purging what we can't use, pulling together what we can use, and supplementing with new items to enhance our learning library.  I am making a conscious effort to add good quality, living books to our library.  We read seemingly constantly, and I want what is available to be enriching and educational and thought provoking, and fun.  We are making good progress in this area, but it is a lot of work.  Thanks to some good friends I have some new resources and the process is very enjoyable.  Books, books, books, and more books!

The three main bookshelves on our first floor have been "sacrificed" to our homeschool.
The first one is in my office.  It holds all the materials we are currently using; well, most of them.
The second shelf is in our family room.  It holds all the books that complement what we are learning.
They are available for reference, family reading time, or just diving into whenever we feel like it.
The third shelf is in our dining room.  It holds all of our creative play items; games, puzzles,
kitchen toys, musical instruments, building blocks, and things of the like.

*In the beginning NONE of these things resided in these places.  My cookbooks have been moved to the book closet, my fiction books are in a box somewhere up there as well, and all of my health and nutrition books are looking for a new corner as well.  It's what we do, right?  BTW - Sharing these pictures is a stretch for me.  They are not perfectly displayed.  Rather they are in their current state of use.  So, you can see that we actually do live and learn here, and it does get messy!  It only stays perfectly organized IF I get around to doing so while my children sleep.

As you can see I have been hard at work, and it's only just begun.  We all have a lot to learn this year.  Harmony will be studying the Bible, piano, character and virtues, homemaking, math, spelling, cursive, history, photography, science, Spanish, and art.  Avery has asked to learn to read, and he is well on his way.  In addition he will be learning about the Bible, piano, character and virtues, math, Spanish, and art.  Bella's path is similar to Avery's.  It's just a little pared back.  She's SO competitive that I wouldn't be a bit surprised if she learns to read right by his side.  The kids aren't the only ones with educational goals this year.  I will be taking a photography and a natural medicine course I purchased through Great Courses.  (Love them!)  I also plan to learn more about using social media with my blog and to promote our business, and I will be trying my hand at gluten free baking.  Not to mention my grand ambitions in homesteading; canning, freezing, gardening, raising chickens and sheep, and on and on.  Plus we have 4-H, and all that entails.  When you write it all out like that it sure sounds like a lot.  No wonder I need to write it all down and get it all organized!

I'm excited about this coming school year, and I'm glad to be figuring out our path.  I've learned to be flexible and go with the flow a lot more.  That being said, I also know myself well enough to know that I need to at least have goals and plans if I want to accomplish anything.  Planning is important in general, and it can be a tall order to put together an entire curriculum for your family, but it is SO worth it!

Here are some more of my favorite resources:

ABC Teach

Scripture Adventures

Simple Homeschool

Exploring Nature

Little Learning Lovies

123 Homeschool 4 Me

CurrClick

Homeschool Share

Our Little Friend

Teacher's Notebook

Khan Academy

Math 4 Children +

Christian Homeschool Hub

Free Homeschool Deals

Teachers Pay Teachers

Happy Planning!