Homeschooling Seasons

Seasons signify changes. Everything has a season. Our friendships, marriages, and lives go through seasons. How things once were may not be how they are now. How we once felt may not currently hold true. Everything goes through seasons.

Seasons allow for improvement. Not always is that the case, but without seasons we wouldn't have the opportunity for change and improvement.

Our homeschool is starting a new season. I can feel it coming just as we feel the arrival of spring with warmer weather.

We have always done the majority of our studies using workbooks. I felt confident in them and with my overwhelming desire for organization and schedule these worked great. I woke up each morning knowing exactly what we would learn, how long it would take to learn, and how we would learn it. There is comfort in repetition like this for someone who desires calm and order.

Then it started at the beginning of the 07'-08' school year. I realized that this wasn't how I wanted to teach my children. I don't want their education to be mundane and that predictable. So I stuck with our math and language program, workbooks, because I firmly believe that they are working wonderfully. But I ditched the reading program and started using library books instead.

This was so much more lively to have an option of what we read and learned about. Some were just silly stories, but children need those. All the books became a springboard for us. What started out as simply something to read turned into much more. We now do book reports on them, both written and orally. That lead to giving speeches. Then we decided to start drawing pictures of what we read and hanging them up as "prized works". And since this worked so well for reading we decided we now want to do this for history and science.

There is something to be said for an education that is enjoyed. If my children don't thoroughly enjoy what we are doing then I am not doing what I set out to do. In my heart I know that if you don't enjoy something then you don't retain what you learned. And there is no point in learning something that you won't remember.

Books are the gold of homeschooling. There is no place in this world that you will ever be required to know everything, but if you know where to find the answer then you have it made. That's what I want my children to know and starting with a love for reading is going to help them to learn it.