Saturday, September 4, 2010

Homeschool, Day 16

Well, here we are....four weeks into our school year and I'm finally beginning to feel like we're in a bit of a rhythm. The kids seem to be enjoying it and - although I am continuing to find it extremely time-consuming - I'm really enjoying it too. Sienna does ask me on a fairly regular basis when they're going to go to a "real school" and I always answer, "I don't know".

We haven't committed to homeschooling for our kids' entire lives. We haven't even committed to homeschooling for a few years. But we made a choice to try it out this year and see how it goes. It's a difficult line for me. I feel insanely busy - more busy than I've ever been before - but part of the reason I'm so busy is because I'm also working. I know that my children are more important than working, but I'm also trying to create a business that will allow my husband to be able to work less. It's quite the conundrum, and we certainly haven't figured it all out yet.

After the first 5-day week of homeschooling, I decided to cut the school days down to 3 or 4 days per week. Five days was just...a lot. And since there are plenty of 3- and 4-day kindergartens out there, I feel that this is perfectly acceptable. I'm finding it really fun to relearn everything (and even learn some new things) as I teach my children. We did a unit study on the days of creation for the first few weeks of school and now we're onto a unit study on safety and emergency preparedness. I find the unit study method of teaching to be fun, but I wonder if I'm making more work for myself than is necessary. At any rate, it's working for now, so we'll stick with it for a while.

Today is Saturday, so I'm off to have some fun. But some of you (eh hem) have been wondering how school is going, so I thought I would update while I had a few minutes.

3 comments:

Sarah said...

Thanks for the update. If I hadn't seen you at playgroup I may have thought you'd just fallen off the planet.

Anonymous said...

Keep in mind that in "real" school, there are lots of kids and teachers can't get as much accomplished as home school sometimes can. If you are working with them for 2 hours a day 3 days a week, you're probably accomplishing as much as a 5 day a week half day kindergarten.

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