As this school year comes to a close, I should be rejoicing, swinging from the chandeliers, thumping my chest and back patting because - what? WE DID IT! OUR FIRST HOMESCHOOL YEAR IS ALMOST OVER.
Cut to reality. A wise mom wrote on one of my many Facebook homeschooling group pages: "The first year of homeschooling is like a pancake, you throw the first one out."
Yeah, let's toss that sucker right out the window and watch it splat on the ground and get attacked by ants.
Lots of ants.
When I started this journey I was overwhelmed, exhausted, scatterbrained, intimidated, excited and curious. After going through these last months I find that I am exhausted, overwhelmed, scatterbrained, curious and excited - I am no longer intimidated. I CAN do this. And I will tell you how.
Curriculum
My laptop is FULL of lesson plans, unit studies, everything I could get my hands on that I "thought" I would use for my children this school year. I have essentially just succeeded in eating up precious megabytes of space on my hard drive as NONE of the things I downloaded was actually used.
I was overwhelmed with info - blogs, blogs, websites, more blogs, it went on and on. I finally gave myself a mental slap across the face and just PICK SOMETHING ALREADY!
Easy Peasy solved my problems. This is a homeschool curriculum put together by a mom, Lee Giles, who has worked her butt off, to provide, FREE curriculum for K-12 in all the relevant subjects INCLUDING electives for high school. It is a smorgasbord of work set up day by day that your child can access via the internet. Granted, some days I wanted to print everything out just to get my kids off the PC.
So I went all out! I tried to give my kids the opportunity of picking their own subjects they would be interested in - that worked - somewhat. In the end the classes were:
- English
- Pre-Algebra/Algebra
- Bible
- Spanish
- French (Outside class)
- Biology (Older daughter only)
- Psychology (Older daughter only)
- Geography
- History (Somehow we NEVER WORKED ON HISTORY)
- Science
Yes......all of those classes. But it was ok, my girls could handle it. I even created a One Note notebook set up just for them, with links, tabs, weeks, days - everything was given to them so they would just have to click, click, click and have whatever work they needed pop up on the PC. It was time consuming.
And I was running myself ragged.
Some days, we did nothing and other days they completed weeks of work in one day. I'm STILL grading work from last quarter.
Oh yeah, the struggle is REAL but I cant say enough, you have to find your niche or better yet, your children's niche. You have to find what works for you.
So to address this, let's talk about English. The English in Easy Peasy worked sometimes, depending on whether or not they had to write, whether or not the online quiz actually had the correct answer, if the links worked - all those things came into play.
Let me be honest, my youngest daughter stopped her English lessons on day 18 and just wrote stories all year long as she waited on me to figure out a curriculum that would benefit her learning style.
Did I mention, I work full-time. Some days I checked their work, other days I blew raspberries aT it and went to bed.
I thought about buying another curriculum because it must be the curriculum that caused my baby girl to just stop. I almost purchased another curriculum but in the end, personal responsibility came it to play.
I needed to be more involved, she needed to be more motivated to not just write all day long but actually complete her lessons.
How could I fix almost an entire school year of missed work??? Stay tuned for Part Two, next week!
Want more info about Easy Peasy?
Lower Grades - High School
Facebook Support Group - there's a blog post for that COMING SOON.
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