Homeschooling notes:

One of the things I love about homeschooling (or even public schooling at home through online school) is the ability to change things around when you find out something just doesn't seem to be working for you. This year we found ourselves fighting the school (online public) more and more. We wanted to do the stuff but in our own way, at least for now. So I'm changing things around and doing what made us want to homeschool in the first place. We want it fun and exciting and more hands on than trying to do a lot of textbooks and worksheets (we'll still do those of course, but less of them and more hands on learning). So with that goal in mind, I asked the kids what THEY wanted to learn about this year and thus our school year starts all over again.

One of the other things about homeschooling is that there are no cut and dried you must finish everything in this order by this date. Which is probably a good thing. We are moving our school year around somewhat this year and going with a more "year round" education philosophy. Which also means that we don't have an "official" school year end/beginning and can just move up as we want to and as we are accomplishing what we set out to do. It also means they can do each subject at their level. For example if they are better at science and math they can move along easier and progress faster while if they are reluctant readers they can move more slowly and progress at a rate that is more helpful and lets them find their love of reading again. I found with the school reading program they started to hate it when I said we needed to read. It became a chore for them rather quickly.  We got our huge order of books and the girls are loving them! So I'll just work with the books they want to read vs. trying to force them to spend so much time on one story that just didn't interest them.

The girls have given me a lot of stuff they want to learn about. Some things they agreed on, while others they had just for them. So I'm going to be redoing some of the school stuff for the year, putting together some things they can do on their own and some stuff they can work on together as a group.

We also are revamping our activities with the homeschool group a little and re-arranging things a bit not to get rid of anything, but adjust which activities we do more often vs. the more "once in a while" activities.

So this will be a busy week not in activities but in the planning.  New adventures coming up soon!