Keeping it Simple!

 

Simplifying our lives can be a challenge, as well as simplifying our home schools.  We began our home education journey when our son began Kindergarten, there were so many decisions to make, or so it seemed.  However, my husband reminded me to keep it simple and I chose to order materials and plans for Kindergarten from a wonderful curriculum company who took the complicated things and simplified them for me.  Although I had been writing my own music education and teaching for five years prior to our childrens' births, it was freeing to have a "guide" with lesson plans and directions and a schedule for the year.  I still had the flexibility to add in extra, fun things including many books to read aloud and we made trips to the library almost every week.  It was so much fun, and it was fairly simple!
I stayed with that curriculum for five years and gained some on-line friendships, when I felt led to make the decision to leave this approach in order to use a different curriculum where we could benefit from meeting regularly throughout the school year with other like-minded, home educating families.  My kids and I needed more support and we craved relationships with real people that we could meet with more often.

So, the next two years were filled with many more events and activities, including 24 weeks with a day of classes together.  We built tremendous friendships and the children gained so many skills that they would not have tried or learned at home with just the three of us, like how to give a short presentation, diagram sentences, write a research report, and we learned so many more facts through our memory work and review games that the children knew they would play each week in class.  A positive peer pressure has been good for them!  I have also developed myself as a tutor of moms and kids in our classes.  It has been good!

The tricky part is that this is not a "packaged" curriculum.  I have had to figure out the curriculum, the schedule, the lesson plans, and how to get it all done!  I have great support for the portions that we work on together as a group, but knowing which history books to read from, how much, how little, how often, are all things that I ponder over and figure out myself now, because I don't have everything all laid out for me on one page or coming in one giant box in the mail.  This has been somewhat freeing and I have found many other resources that I did not know about beforehand, but sometimes I forget to keep it simple!  I begin to  doubt my plans and think they are too simple and add more.  Sometimes I think and write and re-write for weeks until I plan a schedule out exactly the way I want it and then find that we can't do it all.  Approaching another school year, I am in that mode again, trying to figure out all of the curriculum and planning for the next year.  How can I keep it simple?  And yet effective?  Here are some thoughts:

Choose your main method or approach and don't try to combine too many of them at the same time:
I am sticking with the Classical method and "tweaking" it to make a it work for my students and our family.  We love participating in our Classical Conversations community, so that gives me the backbone of what we will be learning about this year through the Foundations and Essentials programs.

Choose your priorities: 

• Our top priority has always been to disciple our children and teach them from God's Word.
• We want our children to have solid academic skills so that they can learn anything and communicate with anyone.
• We want our children to have integrity and empathy.
•  I also want our children to really know the memory work and to gain all of those "pegs" of information to hang other information on later, while they are still in the grammar stage.
• They want to be Memory Masters and my daughter accomplished this for the first time this April, so now I understand that if my son wants to do this, he needs to start with the confidence that he can also do this at the very beginning of the year and really put the effort into it.

Consider your students' strengths and weaknesses:

• I have learned over the years how to modify and adapt our curriculum to help my dyslexic, dysgraphic child.  
• Whenever possible, we will look for materials that lean toward each child's natural learning style, giving them tools that they can use most efficiently.
• I also want both of my children to grow in independence this year, since they are 10 and 12 years old and finally they are both reading on their own. 
• If something is not working, it's okay to switch gears!  I try not to make changes in curriculum often, but we are still "tweaking" our plans for certain subject areas this year that may need something different than what we did last year.
  

Working on math lessons on the computer

THEN, choose your materials:

• I will use Christian, good quality materials that help us to achieve our goals.  We may not read everything in every book that I buy for this school year, but I can plan for the priorities listed above.  
• We will use Classical Conversations materials for our memory work in Foundations and for our English and language arts in Essentials.
• We will use materials that lean toward our children's most natural learning styles, since we already have considered their strengths and weaknesses.
• I also believe in finding the best resources that we can use, so for many subjects we will choose "living books" that tell a story well and engage the reader with high quality literature.

Practicing English grammar memory work

Schedule your lessons so that you can use your time wisely:
I may need to do things differently, now that they are 10 and 12 years old, my children can be more accountable for completing a certain amount of material on their assignments, instead of working for a set amount of time, like we have done in most subjects.  I have had to do that for a number of years because of my son's learning challenges.  I did not always know how much he would be able to accomplish, but I have a better handle on that now and I think I need to give both kids more training in having some independent time and some assignments that they can complete on their own.

So to keep the planning for our home education simple, we will need to choose a main method, select priorities, consider my student's strengths and weaknesses while selecting materials, and then schedule what we can reasonably accomplish.  It sounds like a lot of work, right?!  However, with all of this in mind, I can start to narrow down my overwhelming stacks and lists of books and materials that look good, to what we can reasonably accomplish in light of all of the above.

*Above all, don't forget to cover all of these decisions in prayer!  I ask God to show us the path that He wants us to take for the next school year, but I think that He also wants me to use all of the information He has already given me to make choices and to see what we can truly accomplish and what we realistically have time to do well!  My children are also older and now I can ask them questions about some of their own preferences on materials or subjects to study.  God gives us all of this information, but we must also take time to listen to Him and make sure that our plans are in alignment with His!

May God bless your planning!
Rachel

This post is linked to Living and Learning at Home:  Trivium Tuesdays - Classical Link-Up #68 and Hip Homeschool Hop - 7/30/13.