Summer time

Well, it is summer, so we're officially taking a break, but how do you take a break from learning? We have learned about broken arms and building fences and painting (sadly it was of the functional sort, not so much the creative sort).

My younger ones did learn that using Sharpie pens to make a masterpiece means we have a masterpiece on the table underneath as well. We learned that coffee, left in the coffee pot, will mold after a few days if the weather is hot enough. All in all, it feels pretty uneventful.

The kids are growing, the business is growing, and we just keep trying to keep it all in balance, God first, family second, and the rest shakes out after that, one way or the other.

But with the end of July here, it is time to start looking ahead. We haven't targeted a specific start date, but we have hatched a plan to take a big road trip. This will be our most ambitious trip yet. Of course, with 8 kids, a trip to Wal-Mart is ambitious. We're still in the planning stages, but putting it all together is half the fun. Our tentative plan is to cover the Western half of the U.S., or as much as we can in the time we can get away from the office.

And speaking of the office, our painting expertise (learned from painting the porch) is coming in handy as we add a reading tutoring service to The Speech Works.

That reading lab, and the other services we are adding, are big dreams that are coming true a little ahead of schedule. So the "uneventful" summer is actually a summer of blessings. The kids are healthy, we are blessed with work, and we have a trip to plan.....

Slip Slidin' Summer

Homeschooling--and life--took a turn for the bizarre when my son had an incident on the slip-n-slide. He slipped, but......didn't really slide so much as he fell. After a ride in the ambulance, some x-rays, and a consultation with an orthopedic surgeon, he went home in a brace, and now has a little plastic thing holding his arm together.

We had 3 ace bandages in the closet which the little girls have had fun with since then. They play 9-1-1 and take turns bandaging each other up. It looks like a real trauma ward around here with assorted "broken" arms & legs and occasional head wounds.

But the arm seems to be healing up, and life is getting back to normal--or as normal as it gets.

The curriculum we ordered for next year arrived today. The kids were pretty excited to see that big delivery truck in the driveway....right up until they figured out what was in the box. They weren't too disappointed in the end, since my younger ones had been hoping to move onto computer-based work, and that is what was in the box. Still, they would probably rather have seen any number of other gadgets coming out of that package.

Funny to be getting things for next year already. We are all looking forward to a bit of a break. We will be targeting reading comprehension this summer, using some of the tools from my life as a speech pathologist. I've been really excited over the past month to see the changes in my daughter's reading comprehension with the little bit of extra work we've been able to squeeze in. I can't wait to get some more time to help all of them get that extra reading edge!

choosing curriculum

Since we're using Switched on Schoolhouse as our basis for curriculum, we'll be ordering ahead to get a bit of a discount. Their website is abysmally difficult to navigate for ordering, but the phone support is always wonderful. Choosing curriculum is always a mix and match affair with a bit of scheduled work (SOS, which the kids can do on computer) and a lot of other stuff we call learning from life experience.

digging

I wonder what he is thinking as he digs. This son of mine has dug many holes in his life. When he was younger, we used to send him out with a shovel when he’d gotten into trouble to work off his energy. Some days it seemed he dug nearly to China. When he got older, he assumed other tasks. When the septic tank needed to be dug up so it could be drained, he stepped in with a shovel and dug through the hardened driveway. When the plumbing in the house backed up, he dug up the cleanout and dealt with the problem while his younger siblings ran around holding their noses.

Ed was the one who usually buried the chickens when they met an untimely end, but I never really hung around for that. The day he buried the family dog, I didn’t know how or if he would make it through, but he dug steadily, and his tears were absorbed by the fresh dirt before anyone could notice.

But today, my son was digging for me. He was the one who found the cat who had been my baby before the babies came along. Peanut had longed to be an outside cat, and that worked out fine as soon as we moved out to the country. Over the years, the children had taken her place in the house, but she was independent enough not to mind too much.

My son didn’t want me to look at her and tried to protect me when he found her. “Mom, you can’t be here,” he said, blocking the entrance to the shed with his body. But I reminded him that seeing her there was better than thinking the coyotes had gotten her. She had died in a warm, comfy spot.

I took the shovel out front, and then my son came and gently removed it from my hand and began to dig a deep, deep hole. We stood in the unexpected rain and I watched this boy who is becoming a man and I wondered what he was thinking as he dug another hole.

Last minute

I'm as bad as the kids!

I tell them to pace themselves, not to leave everything to the last minute, but tonight I found myself up against a few deadlines and writing furiously to get everything completed as promised.

Tomorrow we will scramble to get all the assignments together since we save that for Monday. We assign a full week of work at the beginning of the week. We set up a few guidelines as to how that has to come together, but for the most part, the older kids regulate their work flow pretty well. When they don't, we get to say things like, "I give rides to kids who are caught up." That usually takes care of any additional procrastination.

Sometime in this next week we have to fit in time to build a fence for the goats. There has to be a math lesson in there somewhere. :)

Planning and supervising a child’s educational future is an enormous undertaking. Nearly 7 years ago, our family embraced the challenge of homeschooling, and now 5 of our 8 great kids are school age.

We are often asked why we homeschool—the query came again just this past weekend—and it is a hard question to answer. What started as a makeshift solution to a temporary problem turned into a lifestyle change that strengthened our family bond. Along the way we learned that reasons to homeschool are as diverse as families themselves.

So here we are, at the end of our 7th year, and I get a lot of questions about why, about how-to, and, of course the enduring, "are you out of your mind?" And the answers are because it just feels right, anyway we can, and yes.

For those of you who read my column in the Appeal Democrat, welcome to a more informal look--and occasional rant--at homeschooling life. I'll be posting a link to my website soon, and I am hoping to get my email newsletter in the works now that the school year is drawing to a close and I have a bit more time on my hands. Until then, happy homeschooling!