Friday, October 24, 2014

The adventure begins.

This was originally posted on another hosting site on October 15. Since then I've become aggravated with the other hosting service and moved my blog over here to Blogger where I know how to do everything that I need to do and everything works properly, LOL! Enjoy. :)

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We are a brand new homeschooling family.

Well, I'm not brand new to homeschooling. I was homeschooled, from K-12, so the truth is I have a great deal of personal experience. Some aspects of my experience were wonderful, some not so much. We've always planned that once our kids aged out of the K-6 Montessori school we'd switch to independent study, so it's sort of been part of our plan, but this year our son started third grade and for a variety of reasons it just started to feel like now would be the right time to make that transition. And then, once the wheels were set in motion, it happened much faster than I expected it to. The general consensus was that since it was still early in the year it was better to switch him now than to wait, so we made the decision on Friday and we had our first meeting with his new teacher/advisor on Monday morning.

Tuesday (yesterday) was our first official day of independent study work, because we spent most of Monday just getting organized and learning about all of the curriculum and supplies we'd brought home. (I'll explain more in a future post about the wonderful program we're involved with.) It was a rousing success and we were all happy with how the day went. Even our 4 year old had work time with a special packet and then some creative activities. Our third grader was able to be very flexible about what he chose to work on, and he got really interested in the science chapter about alternative energy, so he ended up completing his entire science packet in one shot. 

We're all feeling extremely positive about this new chapter in our lives. The kids are enthusiastic, and yesterday I really felt for the first time in a long time that I had a good handle on things and was doing a great job doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing. It's hard to describe. It felt like by taking the public school schedule out of the equation, I was able to much better manage and meet all the needs of all of my children, without having to compromise one for the other. Nobody needed to delay a nap even though they were crying and exhausted because it was time for school pickup, our oldest was able to do his chores and other things that are required of him without feeling burned out and tired from being at school all day, and our 4 year old was engaged right along with us and felt like he was being homeschooled just as much as his brother!

By now several of my friends have asked me to write about our new adventure, so here it is. This will be a tremendous help for me too, because I'm staying very busy working on really dry and dull things like organizational by-laws and articles of incorporation for a nonprofit organization I'm working to start, so I really need a fun writing outlet. 

Thank you for following along!