Teacher Notes

It’s not very exciting to write about school these days.  Whenever one of my friends who homeschools asks me how school is going, they have an expression of understanding.  I’m in my 2nd year, and I’m finding that nearly every homeschooling family I know goes through some sort of February slump.  The exception to that might be the families I know who educate year round.

I sure feel slumpy, though.  Things like Valentine’s parties, and other antics are my small attempt to keep it exciting.

It’s the time of year where we start to realize how much work we still have left to do this year.  I start to wonder if we’ll get it all done.  It seems like it’s going to last forever.

It’s the time of year where I just try to keep us moving.  I’m trying to remember the different speakers I’ve heard for encouragement.  I’ve been mixing things up a bit to keep some drudgery out.  For instance, 2 subjects that I feel both Silje and I are glazing over are science and grammar.  Since we’re studying botany, I picked up a bunch of library books on the subject, and we’re looking at some of those.  The change has really been good for both of us.  Her favorite book has been one on official state flowers.

As far as English, I haven’t done grammar in a few weeks, but instead I’ve had her work on memorizing poems, and I’ve been reading aloud to her several poems by Robert Frost.  She has been loving this.  We’re not dissecting the poems really at all.  I’m just trying to get her to have a baseline of basic types of poems in her memory so that when we do discuss poetry in the future she has the knowledge to pull from and understand the concepts.  She does talk a lot about the rhythm of the poems, and she has really been enjoying this “unit.”

It’s difficult to find the balance between making changes when you see your child glazing over, and the possible downside to that: removing things that are hard.  I don’t want to remove things that are hard for my kids.  I want to give them the tools to work through them.  We’ve actually been dealing with that in some other areas in our lives.  I feel like the theme of what I teach my kids these last few months is: do hard things!  ‘I know it’s a mess, but you still have to clean it up.’  ‘I know you’re hungry, but you need to wait until everyone is at the table.’  ‘I know you want to sit there, but we’re going to let Great-grandma sit there right now.’

However, when I read a chapter to a child, and they cannot remember one single thing from what I read, I sometimes read portions again.  If that child still has no idea what I said, it’s time to try something else.  It’s not a matter of laziness, it’s a matter of learning.

I’m confident that I made the right choice to wander off the curriculum path in those 2 subjects.  I really am.  However, I’m not sure what to do with the parts that we’re not doing now.  Do I just pick up where we left off when we’re done with our side notes?  We’ll be a few weeks behind, and possibly have to go into summer.  I’ve honestly considered this.  It’s either that, or I’ll have to pick portions of the curriculum to skip.  As silly as this sounds, it feels so wasteful to skip portions of the curriculum.  I’m trying to justify that I’m not wasting them, because they’ll likely get used for another kid down the road.  “Not now” doesn’t mean “never.”

All of these wonderings on how best to work through these curricula is playing into the beginning of plans for what we’ll be doing for school next year.  I may make a few changes here and there.  I hope every year I make a few changes for the better. 

As far as David goes, he still continues on with his math at least every day…sometimes multiple times a day.  He’s still obsessed with chess.  He’s started reading to Elias.  This has been so heart warming.  I’ll be reading to Silje, and I’ll see David and Elias walk off into a corner with a Dr. Seuss book, and David will read the whole thing to Elias and they laugh over the whole thing. 

I’m really eager to incorporate David into our core lessons with Sonlight.  I’m anxious to start him on that.  My plan was to have him do more “major study” with us when he starts 1st grade next year.  This year my goal was to have him reading, and in the habit of doing a bit of school each day.  I was hoping that he would want to do some of the history/read alouds/geography with us, but he has not.  In fact, Elias does more with us than David does.

Next year the choice will not longer be his.  I’m going to make him do those subjects with us regardless of his desire.  That’s fine because he’s still just working up to that.  We’ll be ready then.  I was just secretly hoping he’d want to join in early.  Who knows…the year is still young.