Adjustments: Homeschooling

Living in a more regular place has meant for a more regular homeschooling schedule.  "School" starts every morning at 9am, with an alarm going off an hour before to remind me.  We've started this year slow and simple.  My oldest gets a review of everything we've done since we've started school.  We're starting with some easy kindergarten stuff and working our way up to second grade, the grade she's supposed to be in.  Hopefully the review will go quickly and we'll be back on track in no time!

I started this whole journey off with unschooling.  There was something freeing about being able to work without books.  I loved the idea that children put in an environment rich with opportunities to learn would simply make the choice to learn.  It seemed like the easiest, most natural way to get a child to learn everything.  All I would have to do is provide plenty of opportunities.  I had all sorts of ideas on what we could do or how we might manage "lessons".  I had field trips in mind, projects, everything else.  I started the whole process with a brilliant vision.

Don't all things in life start with brilliant visions and the idea that everything will be so easy?  Isn't it frustrating when they're not as easy as they seem?  While I had great visions, I found my decision came with a lot of flaws.  For my older son, it's been easy.  As long as there are books, he's going to want to read them, or have someone read them to him.  As long as there's something to learn, he'll want to know.  When he thinks he's got it right, he'll come to me all proud and tell me all about it.  His favorite things to point out are animals, colors, and the emotions he thinks everything has based on it's expression.  I'm sure if I left plenty of things for him to learn with just lying around, he'd want to try them all!  My daughter, however, is a completely different story.  If only it were so easy with her!

When I started this whole "unschooling" thing, we were doing pretty good.  She had plenty of opportunities to learn.  I'd turn everything into a lesson, from the playground to the grocery store.  We even had a trip to the safari zoo where she had a chance to meet all kinds of animals.  We talked about everything, from what they liked to eat to where they lived.  We even pulled out maps to show her where all kinds of animals came from.  It was a chance to work on everything from science to geography, and even a little bit on her reading skills.  Things were going wonderfully.  If only they had stayed that way!

At that time, my daughter's father was deployed to Iraq.  I was stuck at home with two children in the middle of nowhere.  I didn't really know many people, and I had almost no support.  Things started wearing on me.  I just couldn't manage the way I wanted to.  I started slacking on opportunities to learn and she stopped wanting to.  Isn't it more fun to play all the time?  I had started falling apart on the unschooling, and the longer I lost ground, the harder it would be to catch up.

Until recently, I've really been fighting to get back the ground I'd lost.  I'd planned trips, but field trips cost money, something no one has much of in this economy.  I'd planned fun projects and suggested games, none of which actually interested my daughter.  I tried to pick up her lessons everywhere we went, but I was met with resistance.  "Mommy, this is so boring," she would whine at every step.  I got frustrated and I was tempted to just put her back in school.  How could I teach her if she didn't want to learn?  We tried to take things that interested her and make those into lessons.  We talked about places that the people who were important to her had been.  We tried talking about animals.  Nothing was a hit.  Everything was met with "school is so boring!"

Having moved in to our new home, we've decided to take a different turn on things.  Instead of focusing on unschooling, something I wanted so badly for my family, I decided to go a more traditional route.  My new house mate's kids were in school, so I asked my daughter if she wanted to go to school too.  Apparently not!  School is a punishment to her, or so she claims!  She wants to keep doing school at home!  Playing all day, as much as she liked it, wasn't going to get anything done, so I took more of the "school at home" kind of approach.  At the start of the school year I went out and picked up workbooks from the local office supply store and we got to work.  We're starting a review of everything we've covered with unschooling and everything we've worked on with the supplies my aunt has sent over the years.  We're working through kindergarten straight up.  After all of her former complaints that everything is too hard, I thought that was the best approach.

The results?  So far so good!  Of course, the year is still young and we've got miles to go before we sleep on this issue, but she's thrilled that the work is so incredibly easy.  She's starting to gain confidence in her own abilities, and it's a good review of basic skills that she could use some practice on.  She may know all her letters and how to write them, but it never hurts to work on technique.  She may know all her numbers, but it can't hurt to practice writing them out.  This has been so easy for her that she's decided that school is actually fun!  Perhaps we can keep this momentum up when we start getting to the harder stuff.

Better still, my older son is starting to get excited about school!  We picked up a couple preschool workbooks for him too and he's so happy to be doing school like a big kid, just like his sister.  He's always been more interested in books and "reading" than art projects and crafts, so perhaps this would be a good time to introduce arts and crafts as well.  He's in a phase where doing what his sister is doing is pretty cool.  Maybe we can keep this going the whole year through!

Now my free time (wait, I have free time?) is going to be spent on doing research on fun and inexpensive projects for the kids, things that can fit in our school format.  Since I no longer have to worry about turning everything into a lesson to teach life skills, such as reading, math, and science, I can just do some really fun arts and crafts projects that don't teach anything but creativity!  I'm actually looking forward to this school year!  For once, I'm not dreading the idea of getting my daughter to learn!  Homeschooling is fun again!

Here I was, so worried that all of this adjusting to a new home was going to be challenging.  I was worried that I'd have to spend so much time trying to figure out how to homeschool with so many kids in the house.  Unschooling was going to be a nightmare with all the unstructured time and chaos from other kids.  Lack of structure has seemed to be my biggest downfall.  In the end, this turned out to be exactly what I needed!  Looks like we're finally taking a step in the right direction!