A Time of Reflection

I've spent the last few days in reflection, deciding where I want to go with this whole homeschooling business, What I want to get out of it and what I want the kids to get out of it.

July is mid winter here and often the time of year I get discouraged and lose interest in our day to day life of homeschooling. It is when I make changes and flit from one thing to another trying to find the right path.

Over the past couple of years I have to admit I have not been finding the joy in homeschooling that I once did. I get tired of the monotony of doing the same thing day in and day out and having so little adult interaction. I am not a natural house wife and struggle to get even the basics done around the house as I simply don't enjoy doing them and have gotten lazy about them. The bulk of our mornings are spent doing school work and by the time the afternoons role around I have run out of steam to get anything else done.

I have also found myself spending more and more time zoning out online when I should really be making the most of this time I have to spend with my children while they are young. I regularly beat myself up over this and make plans to not go on the computer then I get bored and find myself back there again. But they need me and I need to be more available to them and to rejoice in being blessed with the opportunity to spend so much of their childhood with them.

The ACE curriculum we have been using has been great in so much as my children have learned to be diligent and to work towards a goal and meet expectations. It has given them great confidence in their academic abilities and it has made my job much easier as less has been required of me to meet their educational needs. I have also learned a lot about how to apply structure and to encourage them to be accountable for their own academic success. It has really served its purpose while I was going through the pregnancy and 1st year of parenting another baby.
BUT....

I have also lost my passion and my enthusiasm for learning and teaching as have they. They do their work without complaint, they consistently score above 90% on the tests and they have made huge academic progress in a lot of areas, but when their work is done they are lost for things to do and they don't tend to come up with anything creative or interesting of their own accord these days. To them learning seems to have become something that you do at school time in their workbooks/paces which is an attitude I swore they would never have else what was the point of homeschooling after all this is the attitude the bulk of kids who attend PS have.

They still have things they are interested in and they like learning about BUT rarely do they instigate anything of their own accord to further their knowledge in these things these days. Creativity too seems to have gone out the window which I think is probably as much a result of too much electronic entertainment as it is a result of our approach to schooling. Here too I am guilty of being lax.

Sooooooo....

After seeing my ds10 all fired up as a result of a science fair he attended with his Nana and then seeing him enthusiastic about working on a project of his own with her afterwards I started thinking some. And when I heard that he had gotten sooo engrossed with his project while working at his Nana's house that he had worked solidly from 1pm - 4:30pm on it until his Nana had to tell him it was time to pack up and start getting ready for dinner, well then I really had to stop and do some serious thinking.....

Nana with BabyR

I made plans the next day to meet up with another homeschooling friend over coffee and we got to chatting and came to realise we were both lacking enthusiasm and had gotten bored with our homeschooling life, she uses some ACE but also incorporates other curriculum's. We hashed all this out and came to the conclusion that whilst we liked the academic ideals of following a formal curriculum such as ACE and we could see the benefit of following it in order to achieve some form of recognized qualification for high school, she and I as part of our make up needed more variety and diversity in our school program in order to feel fulfilled. We needed to be spending less time focusing on bookwork and more time inspiring learning and discovery on our children's behalf and also for ourselves. We needed to re-ignite the fire that we once had for teaching and learning alongside our children.

As I said my children have in some ways thrived with ACE but in other ways there have been a few negatives. There are some specific aspects to ACE and how it works for my family that I am not happy with. I find the separation of 'Language Arts' subjects to be too time consuming and uninspiring plus I am not impressed with some of the Literature content of Literature and Creative Writing. I really would prefer to have English, Spelling/Vocab, Composition and Literature all combined into one subject so I have been on the look out for an alternative.

I finally decided on Learning Language Arts Through Literature (LLATL) Which I feel will meet our families needs more effectively.

Combine these feeling with the things my friend and I discussed and my ds10 attitude to project style learning and I was seriously beginning to doubt the suitability of using all ACE. These thoughts were then cemented into place when I contacted our two local ACE charter schools and received the information that in order to receive credits for an ACE certificate 85% of our work must be ACE Paces and the LLATL that I was considering was not recognized by them.

Soooooo.....

I have made a decision to trust God with my Children's further education and for now just go with whatever works for all of us with the goal of limiting our seat work and spending more time 'doing' things together and learning through exploration and investigation together. I talked this over with dh and he is on board for whatever I feel will work best for us seeing as I am the one doing the bulk of the homeschooling.

Ds10 with best buddy Baby R

So we trialled this today, putting aside our ACE Science and going back to 'Gods Design For Science - Planet Earth' as this is a topic that Ds10 is currently fascinated with. Today's lesson was about the make up of the earth its different layers and the theories behind the information that we were being presented with. Ds10 was already very well informed thanks to the science fair and time spent with his grandmother earlier in the week so he lead a lot of the discussion and we came up with some theories of our own that we thought were plausible. At 10am we left the house and went shopping for groceries and bought some special ingredients for an activity to support our science lesson which we planned on doing that afternoon.

After we got home I unpacked the groceries and put the baby down for a nap while the older children settled down to do their bookwork which was just 1-2 pages each of English, wordbuilding and math. Nobody fussed and everyone worked well chatting to and fro in the process and helping each other because they were all sitting at the kitchen table while I potted around them unpacking. All up I think it took about 20 minutes to complete these subjects.

We then made model earths using gumballs, marshmallows and melted chocolate to form the crust, mantle and core of the earth. It was a lot of fun and I actually really enjoyed my time with them which sadly I haven't done for a long while.

We have also decided that 2 days a week we will do our 'schooling' in the afternoons while the baby is napping and spend our mornings doing odd jobs or exploring something that appeals to us all something that we can involve the baby in instead of him having to slot in around school work to get attention.

This will tide us over until the LLATL books arrive and then we will add them to our schedule and ds12 and dd8 will get rid of ACE English, WB and Literature but keep the math as this is the best math I have come across so far for my highly visual kids and the Science I will also keep and use as and when I feel it is needed. Ds10 is thriving with ACE's teaching approach so I am hesitant to change anything for him but I will be incorporating more hand on learning and group learning as he loves this sort of thing.

Other than that I pretty much have everything I will need for all the kids over the next 1 - 2 years except for History/Social Studies which I still have one thing I want to purchase when I can find it 2nd hand and that is 'The Mystery Of History II'

As for High School, well if ds12 wants to do correspondence when he is 16 or 17 or attend the local Christian school then he will be free to do that. (The inlaws have offerred to pay for private Christian school if ever he chooses to attend.) In the meantime I will trust God to pave the way for whatever He has in mind for ds.

Ds12 after a fishing trip with his Dad

We will still have set structure and routines each day with daily expectations of what each child must accomplish which is something that we have learned to appreciate through ACE but I wont have to be a slave to curriculum as I would be if I went ahead and enrolled ds12 with the ACE Charter school as I was considering doing next year.

This will be a time of proving for us as we see where we are going and what will be the best path for us.

Right now all I know is I need fulfillment in my role as homeschooling mother and that wasn't happening. I feel a sense of peace today that perhaps we are on the right path again for now.

Blessings

Nina