School is (almost) in session

For those who don't know, we are planning to homeschool the children. For years now, we have been asked if we are homeschoolers and I would reply, "Yes". Then I would usually have to clarify that my oldest was only x years old, but I would be homeschooling him in the future. We were homeschoolers at heart, if not in action.

Well, the future is now. Noah's birthday is in late November, so he was not eligible for kindergarten until this school year. Honestly, I've been dreading it. I've briefly looked at homeschooling methods in the past, but none of them really grabbed me. And don't even get me started on choosing the curriculum. There are dozens of websites and 2"-thick catalogs filled w/ thousands of choices. It's just so overwhelming, especially for someone who doesn't know what her homeschool ideology is besides "I don't want my children to be ignorant."

A few months ago I realized that I absolutely had to get cracking on this. I again looked online at the different approaches to see if I could narrow it down any. A few I could eliminate immediately as unsuitable candidates for our family. I knew I didn't want to order a bunch of textbooks and have public school at home. I like the idea of using "whole" books instead, where possible. (Though textbooks are necessary w/ subjects like math, in my opinion.) I also am not big on unit studies or "unschooling" which seems like it could become very hit-and-miss. So I ordered books about the Charlotte Mason (CM) method and the classical homeschooling (CH) method.

Without explaining what these different approaches involve, I'll just say that I had to make myself read the CM book. It took me 3 weeks to get halfway thru -- it just wasn't sparking my enthusiasm. So I put it aside and picked up the CH book, The Well-Trained Mind. WOW! Now we're talking! It actually got me excited about homeschooling, which is exactly what I needed. In particular, the approach to history is just so awesome and novel. Instead of jumping here and there, it's done chronologically! What a concept! :) I remember disliking history because it seemed so disjointed; there was no flow at all.

The authors have lots of book recommendations (some of those books having been written by themselves), which I wrote down and then researched online. I also used the website for Classical Christian Homeschooling to get book ideas. In the end, I picked some from each. We will also, of course, become good friends w/ our local public librarian.

So now I have half of my book choices sitting on my kitchen island, w/ the other half on a United States Postal Service truck somewhere between here and Atlanta. I'm going to really concentrate on improving Noah's reading and handwriting skills this year (he can read simple stuff but he is not very confident about it). We'll also be doing some math, ancient history, and science. I really like his history storybook; it mainly focuses on the Bible w/ some information about the surrounding cultures woven in. For science we'll be studying different kinds of animals, the human body, and plants. I'd like to keep the science light, interesting, and fun w/ plenty of hands-on activities and experiments.

We'll see how it goes. We may get 2 weeks into this and realize the classical method just isn't going to work, or we may love it. Noah likes to learn but gets discouraged easily. My job will include giving him lots of encouragement, I'm sure.

I told Doug I was kind of excited about learning all the stuff I should have learned all those years ago. My public school experience wasn't too bad overall (hey, I can write a semi-coherent blog post), but I know it was pretty deficient in a few areas. Hopefully Noah won't be able to say the same thing about his education.