Home School Life

Every morning The Girl and I go for a walk before beginning our school day. We walk to school, drop the boys off then continue on our way, taking the dog to the woods near our house. We only take about 15 minutes, but it is a ritual that just makes my morning. This morning I was struck by the changes the season has brought to our favorite spot.

Obviously I’m still figuring out this borrowed camera (and working on my new camera fund.)

Today the kids’ dad and I had a short little check-in about how homeschooling is going. He’s starting to think about when would be the right time to send The Girl back to school. I’ve been wondering myself, recognizing that our rhythm has been disrupted more than I’d like and that it is often difficult to homeschool around my work schedule. The Girl has been going to his house in the afternoons doing some math “homework” and he’s finding it difficult to get enough work done. Not exactly a self-starter, our girl.

Part of me thinks it would be great for her to get back into the classroom, but the other part of me wants to hold onto her a little bit more. I am still concerned about her reading. I’m certain it won’t be addressed properly in the classroom — I’m not even sure it will be addressed properly at home. Her struggles with reading are such a puzzle to me. I know it has a lot to do with her vision and I’m realizing that she’s going to have to figure out a way to work with it, because even after years of vision therapy she is still challenged by her vision. Tonight after we finished reading together she asked when her eyes were going to be better. I asked her why and she replied, “It’s frustrating.” She then went on to say something about not liking how she looks in glasses, but I think her frustration is about more than her appearance. I so want for her to become a person who enjoys reading. She has such an imagination and so loves her solitude — I’ve always imagined her becoming an avid reader. I’m just not sure what more I can do to make that happen.

Well, we don’t need to solve all of our problems now, I suppose. What really counts is that she is a wonderful, compassionate, imaginative girl who is eager to learn.

Today we continued our study of Ancient Persia. I gave her a spelling list and she has her first quiz tomorrow. She is really immersing herself in the stories I tell, which makes it so fun for me. Tomorrow we’ll wrap up Persia with the story of Zarathustra and then move on to math next week.

 I’m so glad that our math block will give us a good chance to spend some time reading. It seems odd, but during a language arts block we spend so much time writing, revising and putting finished work in our main lesson books, that there isn’t a lot of time for reading. Doing math practice problems, math activities and writing rules and drawing pictures in our main lesson books will take up a lot less time in our main lesson, so we’ll be able to devote a good 1/2 hour to reading together. We still need to finish up the Ramayana and get back to the book I started reading to her before we started our India block, The Ancient One by T.A. Barron. My class loved this book, and The Girl is already really enjoying it, as well.

Tomorrow I’m looking at possibly another morning in the kindergarten. Can’t pass up the chance to make a little extra substituting money, though it sure is disrupting our homeschooling routine. Oh well, there’s always the weekend.