Home School Journal - The Rear View Mirror

Well, we are almost looking at home school in the rear view mirror.  Alex has two subjects to complete and he will be done with first grade.  Ever since I made home school the first activity of our day and started paying the neighbor to watch Annie three days a week, school has been great.  There are still moments of defiance or struggle and when I say moments, I mean really small ones.  

In the last month, I have begun to think about next year.  Every so often, I look into other programs and so forth just to see if there were perhaps a better program.  Every time I do, I find myself coming back to Seton Home Study School with confidence.  No program is perfect and not all aspects fit every child. But, I have found that with a little supplementation to fit my child, Seton is very well-rounded.  

Next year, we will be adding Classically Catholic Memory to our work.  I was interested in doing it and then it turned out many of the other Catholic home schoolers in our area were also interested.  So we are getting together and doing it in a co-op setting.  I am very excited about this.  We will have a much better home schooling community and our children will benefit from the classical education.  I did not think about it before this moment, but I guess I need to start praying about our new endeavor.  

Kristiana has only been working on preschool material two days a week.  I think she is a little intimidated.  In the beginning learning seems hard, but with a few small successes she will be on her way.  Now that Alex is done for the school year, I am going to enlist him to help teach Kristiana over the summer, which has been my plan all year.  He will like this because he will finally get to do all the easy stuff that looks like fun to him, but is learning for Kristiana.

Here are Alex and Kristiana working away at school.  Kristiana needs the tactile preschool activities, which makes Alex jealous.  Here she has her number puzzle, alphabet puzzle and her pattern block set.  She did great work. 

Here are my little troublemakers.  Annie is laying in the chill-out spot.  Whenever she starts to get into too much stuff, I ask her to lay down and get cozy.  She likes this activity.  I took this picture, because little Lucy crawled up onto her motorbike, sat down and was reaching down and teasing Annie.  It was pretty clever.

This week we focused on systems in the human body.  I made up experiments to help Alex and Kristiana discover how the systems work. Here we are checking out the nervous system with pin pricks.  We did double pin pricks and single pin pricks to see how the nerves send messages to the brain.  In this picture I am being pricked, but the kids had to be blindfolded and pricked as well.

Despite some of our struggles during the year I have remained confident in this choice to teach our kids ourselves.  I am hopeful for the future.  What a life.