Greetings, all two of my readers! I hope this blog post finds you well and in a stress-free position in advance of the upcoming holidays. I thought that, before my own life gets holiday crazy, I would try to sit down and process our general routines and "stuff we do" - sort of as a means of preparing for next semester and also, as a means of thinking through our plans for school next year, as the application deadlines for the 2020-21 school year are fast approaching and I need to be figuring out what we want to do as a family. No sweat, right?
In the Beginning...
I guess I should talk again, briefly, about how we got to this place. In a nutshell, we decided to take this year away from traditional school, initially because I began to develop strong feelings that kids don’t have a lot of time and freedom to just be kids these days. Just to go outside and play, or be bored, or come up with experiments or create stuff just to feel the awesome good feelings that go along with making something. After a full school day, whatever after school activity we had, dinner, homework, it was practically time for the kids to go to bed to start again. They were tired, sometimes stressed, and tied to a routine that gave them very little freedom to explore. So the kids spend all day away, come home drained and then have to power through homework (which isn't often a fun thing for ANY of us)? Tell me, where in that hamster wheel can I make meaningful and intentional connections with my kids regularly?
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| The reasons why |
Kids in high school are working themselves to the bone to get into a great college; kids in middle school are working hard to prepare for working in high school; and kids in elementary school are working more in preparation for middle school. It all trickles down. I may sound like an old curmudgeon, or someone who has lost touch with reality, but I don't believe I am either of those. I think a lot of parents have similar feelings deep down. It's frustrating and sad and overwhelming and it's hard to figure out how to slow the train down.
And that's not related to the specific school we had been at - I saw efforts there to find unique and innovative ways to engage the kids. The cost of tuition there, plus pressure to donate, really adds up with multiple children, and the stress on kids in an any elite private school as they move up through the grades just grows and grows. However, my issues are really a function of how the education system as a whole is set up, and I just don't see that improving as my kids get older. So now was the time to take a break from it all and try a different way, with different and/or additional goals. I know that I am extremely lucky in that our household doesn't need to add a salary to my household to make ends meet, and I have the availability and freedom to explore this with my kids this year.
And that's where we began. We withdrew from school and enjoyed our summer, which included some camps for the girls and lots of summer fun, and I prepared for the year ahead. With lots and lots and lots of reading. And then more reading. And as the days passed, the school year pulled closer into view.
Gearing Up for the Year
I did a very Kristin Beckman thing and signed up my kids for a lot of activities really fast and way in advance. It was easy to do this, because sign ups started in July and since the start of the school year was several weeks away it was easy to just click "register" and then put it away in my mind and not think through logistics. I knew I wanted them in activities at their previous school so they could still see their friends and teachers and not feel a huge loss of the community they had been a part of. I also knew I wanted the chance to explore the homeschool-friendly theatre classes in the area, and any other things that interested the girls that we now had room for.
Predictably, when it was time to pay up (in terms of actually thinking through how our typical week would go), I felt overwhelmed. When I added everything up, there weren't a lot of holes with lots of consecutive open hours and while I knew the actual "school" stuff wouldn't take us a ton of time each day, I wanted them to have free time to play, be bored, explore their own interests independently. I pumped the brakes a bit and didn't add a couple of things I had planned to. All of this confirmed my initial plans that we should start academic stuff slowly and see where and how everything fit together before adding anything else to our plate.
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| When Elsa homeschools, but has to get to a piano lesson up the street |
One Subject at a Time
When we first, sort of, "launched" this school year, I wanted to start with just getting a feel for how much time we actually had in a day - as in how much time does it actually take to intentionally work on some academic stuff with the kids each day relative to a school day? For this reason, we started with one subject only for the first couple of weeks. Writing. Specifically, creative writing.
Writing is my oldest's favorite subject, and I love how enthusiastic she is about it and I wanted to continue to encourage that passion for her and to spark a small fire for it in her sister. This is also where I started my own research over the summer. I knew I wanted writing to be a skill of emphasis at home, because if you can write, and you enjoy writing, the world opens up for you in a special way. You can process so much of yourself, your views, your feelings, your knowledge in writing.
There's a whole lot of super dry, technical, heavily grammar-focused writing curricula out there for homeschoolers but I happened to run into one that I felt was pretty special right off the bat, and so much of what the author said really spoke to me. That curriculum was Brave Writer. I am going to write a post in more detail about this, and about what we do at home for writing, but this was my starting place with our own homeschool year and I regret nothing about it thus far.
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| Working on her fractured fairy tale |
Mathy Math Mathh
After a couple of weeks, we added in some math. There are lot of opinions about math and homeschool, let me tell you. Some families don't do it at all for a while, and there are studies out there that indicate that older kids can developmentally understand and process math a whole lot better than younger kids, so it comes to them super quickly and easily and you won't have to catch up so much in the end. Others think you should follow strict curriculum and do math every day. Some farm math out to tutors or online classes. None of these are wrong!
In the end, I decided to pull math into our world for a couple of reasons: First, if we are re-entering school next year as originally planned, the kids are going to need to be fairly up to speed in order to keep up in their next grades; Second, I have never been sure that my oldest kid established a great foundation in math during first grade- and if the foundation from the year before is shaky, then it's harder for her to keep building on skills, which is what math is really all about. Also, my younger kiddo is really naturally strong in math and I thought this would be an area she would grow quickly in with the time we could spend on it in a home setting. Nowadays, math is part of our regular routine. Do we do it every day? No, not in what many of you might consider an academic sense. We do have a couple of curricula I read and piece together in lessons for them 2-3 times a week, but we do a ton of using math through games (computer and physical games) and other activities that are fun and engaging because I am a believer that they learn a lot better if they are engaged and having fun. So while they do practice some math skills every day, we don't do lessons every day. There aren't tests or quizzes or even many worksheets. I will talk more about our math stuff in a more detailed post as well, because this one is getting long enough and I am just rambling at this point.
Other Stuffs
We have readalouds together, and the kids do plenty of independent reading. They practice instruments, they have time to create and build and explore on their own. We check out library books regularly and they have to pick some non fiction books each time so they can help fill out our daily "fact of the day" and "word of the day". We also have finally started to consistently incorporate art, which has been an important priority for me because I highly value the learning of ways to creatively express yourself. We also work in lots of random stuff that's fun and interesting to us - a few weeks back we learned a different way to write in code each day and that was really something they both latched on to. They wrote so many coded notes!
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| I am telling you, the code thing was a huge hit |
Lastly, we have our project - our Disney project - which I talked about in a previous post, and which I am certain at least one of my two readers will still roll their eyes at. But again, it's all about connecting lots of things to something they are familiar with and are excited about. I touched on the "jumping off" points in the previous chat, and we've continued with those. We dove into a new art topic this past week, for example - op art. Disney Parks use a lot of forced perspective in their buildings for various reasons, and forced perspective is really all about tricking the eyes to sense things differently than they really are. So we talked about that concept and pivoted over to using optical illusions in art, ala Victor Varesely and Bridget Riley, and then we created our own op art pieces this week which has been a blast. Next week we are going to jump into a few different architecture discussions that will take us all around the world and I can't wait. I've been studying up on all things architecture so I can be ready! I'll be sure to keep y'all posted!
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| Our very own "Op Art Exhibit" |
Oh! I also started an Instagram page to post photos and more frequent and timely updates. Check us out @beckmanfamilyadventure.
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Peggy