I'm really excited to be starting this new blog about homeschooling. I love homeschooling, but sometimes I get very frustrated by it. Not because of my kids, who also love homeschooling, but by both the lack of information and the overload of information out there.
When it came down to finding things like curriculum and textbooks and worksheets I felt very frustrated. I found textbooks online going for a minimum of $50 (used) each. $50 might not sound like much but it is when it is book one of a series of six books that your first grader is supposed to cover over the year. $300 per subject each year is A LOT of money to shell out. Yes, you can reuse the books, and that's why they cost so much money, but I'm not planning on having 10 kids over here! Also I couldn't seem to find worksheets online for the subject material that I wanted, so I found myself either buying workbooks - which is fine - or writing up my own - which is not so fine. But curriculum is by far my biggest gripe. No one, anywhere, seems to have curriculum ideas posted. And if they do mention it they say something along the lines of "We don't use things like textbooks, worksheets, or curriculum. We just let our child figure things out on their own." That might work for some people, and that's fine (that's actually how one of my sister-in-laws decided to homeschool and it works great for them) but I wanted a bit more of a hands-on approach.
Likewise the overload of information going in the opposite direction is staggering. Like I mentioned before when gripping about curriculum the number of people out there insisting on the "hands-off/don't worry about it approach" is mind blowing. They are full of information and advice - on what NOT to do.
So I decided that what I need to do is start my own blog, which will hopefully help out anyone out there who is feeling as adrift as I was at times, and like I still am at some moments.
So, meet our homeschooling family. There is me, Ash Falcon. I'm a stay-at-home mom/housewife. I'm the primary homeschooler in the house. I am constantly working on curriculum, trying out new ideas to see what works, finding new projects, checking out new homeschooling books, searching for the perfect textbooks and worksheets to use, and generally obsessing about homeschooling to the point that I probably drive my husband crazy.
Then there is my husband, Coffee Hound. He works to support us. He is - both fortunately and unfortunately - wonderful. He drives me crazy, I drive him crazy. It works for us.
Then we have twins, Optimus Prime and Bumblebee. They are going to start first grade in August, however that doesn't mean that they are out of school right now! We homeschool all year round. No winter break, no spring break, no summer vacation. Why? I found that they retain the material better if we go over it consistently everyday. If we take more than 2 days off they do a brain dump and we wind up backtracking to recover some ground. It's very frustrating, but I actually don't mind doing schoolwork everyday. This also means that we don't have to cram every single subject in every day since they homeschool on the weekends too. They do get two days off a week - after all I don't want them to burn out - but those two days are not in a row. We seem to get the best results that way.
My youngest is Scooby-Doo and he's not homeschooling yet. He will start in August with some preschool work even though he's a bit young for it. He loves copying his older brothers in everything that they do. Right now his own "schoolwork" consists of a clipboard with coloring book pages on it. However in August he will start some "Colors & Shapes" workbooks that I picked up at the dollar store. He's nowhere near ready for the concept but I think he'll be happy to have some real schoolwork to do.
Now, like I said, we don't do a Monday-Friday school week. For Optimus Prime & Bumblebee's pre-k year we did schoolwork every other day. For their kindergarten year I started doing two days on, one day off. For first grade my plan was to do two on, one off, three on, one off, however they have actually started that schedule a couple of weeks ago. They had a couple of missed days from being sick in the winter and we are hoping to take a short family vacation and my my mom is planning on visiting in July so there are a few days to make up and a few days where we will be too busy for schoolwork so we started the 2/1/3/1 schedule early but in the end it will still work out to be the same number of days as the 2/1 schedule.
Soon I'm going to be posting all sorts of stuff. Our curriculum, our textbooks, our workbooks, our resources, our goals, and how we go about planning everything. I hope my information helps you!
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