FEBRUARY BREAK!

Yes, it’s our very own version of Fall Break only it happens in February.

This is the first time in a few years that the teens’ birthdays are in the same week.  Plus I *thought* we would be gone all day today for a basketball game in Tennessee (snow changed that), so we’d only have two full school days.

I officially declared this FEBRUARY BREAK and there is NO SCHOOL at the Hawks’ house this week.

Man, I love homeschooling!

Visiting Russia Today…

We are cooking Russian today!  Sometimes I jokingly refer to Sonlight’s Core 5 – Eastern Hemisphere Explorer as ‘Cooking Around the World’.

On the menu?

Russian Egg Soup (Flower Child is obsesses with Egg Drop Soup.  She tries to find a recipe from every country we visit.)

Apple Pie – This is more like a tart than a pie, but it looks really yummy.

I forgot to save the link where I found the recipe.    I searched ‘Russia recipes’ and two sites returned that were written by Russians.  Some of the English word usage was funny, but the recipes were awesome!

(I’ll post recipes later today.)

Our Story ~ Year 2

If our first year was the year of Speed Racer, our second year was the year of Molasses Slow.

After being warned by many homeschool ‘experts’ that it is impossible to find the perfect curriculum during your first year, I decided to use The Well Trained Mind for the older two and send Flower Child to preschool.

What was I thinking?  It didn’t take long to realize that while I liked the idea of The Well Trained Mind, I wasn’t all that great at choosing and scheduling readers.  Two months after we started Ancient History, the older two were begging for Sonlight.  (It is a well known fact that Sarita Holzmann and the folks at Sonlight have a knack for choosing readers and history books that my dc love.)

Once again I decided to buck ‘expert’ opinion and ordered a new Sonlight core for the family, taking a loss on some of the TWTM resources I’d bought.  Rather than move on to Core 5 with an 8yo, I went back and ordered Core 2 – Introduction to World History.  (FYI:  It is now Core 1+2 and SL now sells a two-year Introduction to World History program.)  In true Bibliovore fashion, the kiddos devoured the readers well ahead of time.

But, unlike our race through Core 3 & 4, we took our time with the history.  We read extra books from the library.  We built sugar cube pyramids.  We only did ’school’ four days a week, saving Friday for hikes and the library.  By the end of the school year, we were just barely knocking on the door of the Middle Ages.  I usually share this story on SL when folks are afraid of using a ‘lower’ core for their ‘advanced’ students – yes it was ‘easy’, but it was hugely rewarding following all the rabbit trails their questions led us down.  Since they weren’t spending so much brain energy trying to process advanced vocabulary and themes, they were able to ask their own questions and then search out the answers.  Awesome year – and it solidified my desire to stick with Sonlight as long as we homeschooled.

Other things I remember from this year…  Horizons Math again – 4 for Princess, 5 for Austin.  Science was nature study ala Charlotte Mason and Starved Rock State Park.  For language arts the older two did Wordly Wise and Wordsmith Apprentice (SL LA was in the development stage at this point and I was having trouble getting it to work with the previously public schooled dc.)  I was happy with everything we used.

Preschool?  What a disaster!  It was supposed to allow me some extra time to work with the older two, but the extra time wasn’t worth the headache caused by the schools.  Plural.

She lasted exactly three days at the YMCA preschool.   I walked into the classroom to pick her up and Flower Child was nowhere to be found.  With two teachers in the class, she still managed to get out of the classroom and was waiting for me at the lower doors of the building.  She was FOUR years old.  The YMCA sat along the banks of the Fox River just before it empties into the Illinois.  My heart still jumps into my throat when I think what could have happened.  That was her last day at the Y.

Next up was our church’s preschool.  All in all not a horrible place, but too many stupid and unnecessary rules.  Like no parents on field trips unless you are an official class chaperon.  Right.  I’m going to send my kid who escaped the YMCA classroom on a trip somewhere with strangers.  The other, larger issue, came at the end of the year.  At some point, they started sending books home with the kids.  Since she was still doing Sonlight at home (Horizons Math K and LAK on Tuesday and Thursday), I mentioned to the teacher that we really didn’t need any extra books.  Teacher said it wasn’t a big deal, not to worry about it.  Oh… except at the end of the year every stinkin’ kid in the classroom got an ‘award’ for all the books that they’d ‘read’ during the year.  Except Flower Child. Given my inability to deal with traditional school bureaucracy and mentality, I won’t make that mistake again!

For sports, it was YMCA swim team (LOTS of fun!), soccer, floor hockey, and basketball.  There was always something going on at the Y!  Austin also took his first ‘real’ art class at that YMCA.

All in all this was a great year.  We were settled into our routine in Illinois and enjoying life on the prairie.  We didn’t move and had no idea another move was on the horizon.

Our Story ~ Year 1

After spending a month memorizing reading every homeschool curriculum catalog I could get my hands on, I made our first decisions.  For God So Loved the World, a unit study published by Christian Cottage Schools was going to be the backbone of our year.  (Yes, right from the beginning I knew our school would be missions focused and that I wanted my children to learn to love all of God’s people.  This is actually should be a whole post on its own!)  For language arts and Bible I ordered the grade-appropriate Alpha Omega LifePacs; for math I chose Horizons 2 for Princess and Saxon 5/4 for Austin.  I also bought BJU Science 3.

What?  No Sonlight?  No.  At this point, no Sonlight.  Knowing the voracious reading habits of my Princess, several people recommended I request the Sonlight catalog because it was the best source for great literature on the market.  Unfortunately, my first Sonlight catalog came and all I received was the cover – the guts had gone missing somewhere along the line.   Back in those days, internet was dial-up and it was slow.  At the same time, the Sonlight website was difficult to navigate and didn’t really give the ‘flavor’ of what Sonlight is about.  Something kept nudging me to pursue them, and so I requested a second catalog that came a week before we were to start our first school year.

My first Sonlight catalog.  What an experience!  I was hooked from the beginning, my decision solidified when I read 27 Reasons NOT to Buy Sonlight.  (Sonlight has since  written another great article, 27 Reasons Families Love Sonlight.)  History has always been my favorite school subject and my love of history came not from text books, but from the books and diaries I read growing up.  I knew that Sonlight’s method of marrying readers to History was exactly what I wanted for my children!

I packed up the LifePacs and sent them packing.  Even though we lost the a 10% restocking fee.  It was worth every penny! (Since then, we’ve twice ordered LifePacs to fill time or a gap, and both times I was unimpressed.  Thus, I won’t even post a link.)  The boring BJU textbooks went back to the publisher, although we had to keep the worksheets since I’d already opened them.

Introduction to American History Part 1 was our very first Sonlight core.  I ordered the 4-day advanced readers package for Princess (then 7) and the regular readers package for Austin (then 9 and a reluctant reader).  Eventually, we ordered the missing 5 -readers because they were consistently finishing them ahead of schedule.  I made a lot of mistakes that year, the most troublesome to me being that we finished the core as if we were in a race, never taking time to enjoy the books enough.  They worked through Core 3 and Core 4 through WWI that first year!  (We also did the Little House in the Big Woods unit study from The Prairie Primer the last month of our school year.  What fun!)

Another mistake was forcing Austin to do Saxon 5/4 for far too long.  He hated it.  It brought him to tears nearly every day.  He was used to colorful workbooks with large, easy to read writing.  He hated writing out the problems on his paper and he struggled with Saxon’s no-nonsense approach.  Eventually, my heart won out over my head and I switched him to Horizons 4.  The change in his attitude was immediate and I was thankful that I hadn’t listened to the many voices telling me not to switch in the middle of the year.

If I were to start over again, armed with my many years of Sonlight experience, I would start them in what was then Core 2 (now it is 1+2) and we would take our time.  I was so excited to get to cores where history and readers were together that I overlooked the value of the earlier cores.  I realize now that now every reader has to be related to history and that the library has more books than one seven year old can possible read in a year.  That doesn’t mean that our whirlwind year of American History was without value – quite the contrary! – but we could have learned even more if the pace was slowed and the history a bit easier.

What about Flower Child?  Well, a month or so after we started I ordered Core PreK for her.  This was back in the day when there was no Instructor’s Guide and everyone just winged it.  The books were wonderful.  Stories I remember reading over and over and over to her:  Chicka-Chicka Boom Boom and Good-night Moon.  I didn’t realize at the time that I was setting the foundation for a life-time of reading, didn’t realize that I was inspiring another voracious reader.  Back then, it was just fun cuddle time with my youngest.

During this year we moved from northeastern Illinois to a small city in the middle of the state.  We lived with my parents for a couple of months after we sold our house but were unable to find anything decent for sale in the area where we were moving.  Homeschooling during these transitions was a HUGE blessing!

It was very difficult for Princess to do school in such a different way in the beginning, she’d always had emotionally difficulty during transitions (like moving into a new class at preschool) so it wasn’t unexpected.  Fortunately, my enthusiasm for homeschooling carried us through.  That and the great field trips.

Snow Day!

We homeschoolers are really a mixed up bunch.

I’m looking forward, praying for, a snow day tomorrow so we can stay home and work on school.  We spent most of the day in town today running errands to prepare for the storm and only got minimal school done.  Tough, since Wednesday is our heaviest day of seat work.

Tomorrow, however, is normally a lighter day due to basketball practice.  If practice is canceled we can finish today’s work tomorrow!

Follow my logic?

Back to the grind…

Our first days tend to be our best days.  Must be all that extra energy we’ve been storing during vacation!

Flower Child still hasn’t found her binder, so she may never progress beyond 6th grade math. :p

Sweet Sisters

Curriculum doesn’t matter?

Luke Holzmann posted about this NHERI study on the Sonlight blog. Interesting stuff! I’m curious if they found there is no difference between unschooling and using a packaged curriculum. The full report is supposed to be published some time in January and I’m looking forward to reading it.

There are no statistically significant differences in achievement by whether the student has been home educated all his or her academic life, whether the student is enrolled in a full-service curriculum, whether the parents knew their student’s test scores before participating in the study, and the degree of state regulation of homeschooling (in three different analyses on the subject).
Homeschooling Across America: Academic Achievement and Demographic Characteristics

I love Sonlight, no doubt about that. And I can’t fault them. After nine years of Sonlight readers Austin finally became a reader. At age seventeen. I give much of that credit to the excellent literature that he was exposed to over the years.

I love unschooling, too. I think letting our high schoolers take responsibility for their secondary education pays dividends when they move on to college and the working world. To me, that’s the most important difference between a traditional school setting and teaching at home. (In high school, there are other reasons that are more important in the younger years.)

Honestly, we’re all a bit ill at ease with our new format and we’ve actually gone back to where I’m more involved in their day-to-day Sonlight studies. (It’s hard NOT to look forward to those family interactions when they are such an important part of our daily life!) But after reading this article I have confidence that regardless HOW we do it, we’re going to be successful BECAUSE we’re doing it.

Wanted: Motivation

I woke up this morning ready to tackle school the teens monthly school schedules for the next couple of months.  Somewhere along the way that motivation fizzled and I ended up cruising the blogs of old friends.   While I didn’t get the schedules done, it was a nice trip down memory lane.

Schedules?  Yes, I’m still giving the teens a ’schedule’ of sorts for History and Literature. They also write in their own Bible reading schedule.

Flower Child has something similar, but it’s based on each country/area she studies in Sonlight Core 5:  Eastern Hemisphere.  Unfortunately, she’s lost her notebook. Ugh.  Including three unfinished math lessons and two unfinished language arts lessons.  I let her do them on her own timetable, but the problem is that she can’t go on in either book until those lessons are finished and she can’t finish those lessons until the notebook is found.  Maybe this is a sign?  Total unschooling?

Letting Go – Week #6

We’re still hanging on.  It feels strange and completely foreign to me and it’s easy to see why some families give up early on in the game.  It’s unsettling!  Especially after homeschooling for nine years with Sonlight only – there hasn’t been any deviation.

I’m sure the added stress of our Holiday – Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Birthdays – Season doesn’t help.    From Thanksgiving until February 4th we ramp up from merely fast-paced to going at nearly the speed of light.  This season actually has a very promising start.  I have nearly all of our shopping done, have planned out our gifts for friends and family,  and I’ve even bought the Christmas cards.  The weather has been so beautiful lately, I think my usual winter blues have taken a vacation.  It could have something to do with not having a lot of money for gifts this year – I’ve always wanted to scale back, but dh was never on board.  It’s very liberating not to have to spend way too much money on way too much <useless> stuff.

I missed my ‘year’ conferences with the teens for Core 300, so we are going back to that.  Originally I wanted them to do all the reading and footwork and only check in when they finished their decade summary.  Nice thought, but I realize now that there is much value in our time together discussing each year.  It’s even more exciting as Austin is working on decades that both dh and I have lived through.

Now I have to figure out whether the Battle for the Clean Room is worth it or not.  Flower Child could easily be a messy poster child.  She might even be TOO messy.  But, I haven’t come down to hard on Austin and <miraculously?> in the last couple of months he’s been keeping his room CLEAN!  Will his sister grow into her own method of organization?