The Home School Journey

Home schooling is definitely a journey!  It can be joyful, challenging, fun, hard and frustrating, all in one day, but totally worth it!   I love to see when the ‘light bulb‘ goes on in one of my daughter’s eyes because she finally understands a concept!  We have good days, we have bad days, and I wouldn’t change it for anything!  I am so thankful that we have the freedom to home school our children in this country!

One thing I have learned through this home schooling journey is I need to be flexible!  We may wake up one day and it turns out to be the smoothest day.  We get all our work done, no one is arguing or bickering, chores get done, dinner is made, the house cleaned up and all by 9:00 a.m.!  Ok, maybe it’s never been that perfect, but we have some pretty awesome days where all does go well!  But…..then we wake up one day and all seems to go wrong!  The girls are fighting, the house somehow got messy overnight (who did it?), I have no idea what we are having for supper, it takes two hours just to get one subject done and the list goes on…..On these days it would be nice to go back to bed….it’s unproductive anyways!  But, I trudge on and eventually either the day gets better or it ends!  Gratefully, we don’t have too many days like that!  Most days are somewhere in between…edging more towards the good days than the bad!

It really helps being organized and having a schedule.  Knowing when we start, what we are doing and having everything ready to go helps to make it less stressful for me.  But, like I said up above, I have learned, slowly but I’m learning, to be more flexible!  There will be days when we aren’t able to finish everything and guess what…..it’s ok.  I remind myself the goal is for my girls to learn and remember what they learn, not just long enough to get through a test!  A lot of subjects build upon themselves and if you haven’t learned the basics you will get further behind.  For example, if you haven’t learned what a subject and predicate are, how are you going to find a direct object?  If you can’t multiply, how will you divide?  The beauty of homeschooling is you can work as long as you need or stop short on a particular concept and move on if they figured it out faster than you originally planned for.  My youngest daughter has been sick all week and has lost her voice (it’s been very quiet around here) so we haven’t finished much school work.  How could she read out loud if she hasn’t a voice?  Before, I would stress and we would have to catch up to get ‘back on track’.  Now, we will not skip her English lesson we missed…she may not learn what a predicate is, but we will not double up to get done on my scheduled time frame!  It still stresses me out not being “on schedule”  but I need to remember it stresses them out to have an overload of work to ‘catch up’ on!  How do I expect them to remember what I am hurriedly cramming down their throat just to stay on track! This has taken me 10 years to learn, yes I guess I am a slow learner!  I’m sure I will learn more lessons along the way too…hopefully to make me a better home school mom!

As I work on this blog, my goal is to share something that may help or encourage you in your home school journey!

If you have any questions, comments or suggestions feel free to comment.  I’m always open to suggestions to help my home school journey run smoother!

Take care!