Last year was our first year of homeschooling. I bought portions of a preplanned curriculum last year, but with the intention that I was just using parts of it and would just plan the whole thing myself. (Then I sold most of it shortly after starting the school year anyway.)
And that was just what I did all school year long — I planned everything, and almost all from different sources. But, do you know what? I was exhausted. I was sometimes planning right while we were doing school. As long as I stayed one subject ahead of the kids, I felt like I was keeping up.
Not only did I suffer because of this, but I realized they were suffering with it too. I was often stuggling to get in all of our core subjects, and was neglecting many of the subjects that were the very things that I was excited that I would be able to do with them while we homeschooled.
This year, I decided that I couldn’t do it all. So, I did some serious research (and prayer!) about what I needed to do. I finally settled on Winter Promise for next school year. Although I will continue to plan out several of our subjects, I am letting them plan our social studies, reading (not language arts, just reading), and science. We use Horizons for math, so there is not really much planning involved at this point. Not only does this free me up to focus on the parts that I will be planning within the core subjects, such as Language Arts (which encompasses so much!) and Religion, but it also frees me up to add in things that we were really lacking, like art and music, as well as subjects like Spanish (Rosetta Stone) and Typing.
Now that I am giving up on planning it all myself, I’m actually excited for next school year. And, even better — my kids have been so excited as they see all of the fun books coming in to the house to go along with Winter Promise. And, really, that was one of the biggest reasons that we started homeschooling — we just wanted them to be excited to learn. But, if I can be excited about it too, then that’s even better!
This post is linked to Thirsty Thursday.
photo by jimmiehomeschoolmom
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I appreciate this. I will be homeschooling for the first time this coming year. My oldest is currently in public kindergarten and I’m orchestrating my own curriculum so to say. Not doing everything by scratch, of course, put will basically decide how we get our objectives met. Since he’ll be in first grade I think I can maneuver the basics okay…*with much prayer*…:)