The 6 (or so) month review of home schooling

Now that I have about 6 months under my belt of doing the home school thing, I thought I would take some time to reflect...isn't that some of the point of a blog?

First of all, home schooling for us so far has just been great! Most of you know, I'm not really the type to gush over anything. Even when I think things are great, I'm still one to point out the bad part too. With home schooling, I am just all about seeing the good side of it!

Here's my list of what has been great - now you have to remember my perspective of coming into being a home school mom first. I was the career mom who worked a minimum of 50-60 hours a week and was gone a couple times a month and I loved my career. My boys had a dad who stayed home with them and did a fantastic job. I switched to being the primary at home parent about a year before attempting to home school while we were living in someone else's house and had just moved to a strange city. We moved again (another new place, but our own house this time) and soon after the home school adventure starts.

What I love...
1. The laid back schedule. Every morning is not a struggle to get people dressed, breakfast eaten, teeth brushed and out the door at a specific time. We start when we start and I like to get up and get going, but we don't have to start at a specific time.
2. The laid back schedule. The boys and I have been gone many weeks doing great stuff that couldn't have happened if Andrew was enrolled in a traditional school.
3. Learning at our own pace. If we aren't really up for paying attention, the lesson will wait and not just be missed because one of them couldn't pay attention at the time.
4. Structured quality time with my boys. I'm not much of a "play" person or a silliness lover. I like to play games and do constructive kind of things but not really all about doing all of the boy playing. This gives me some great structured time with them.
5. Sonlight Curriculum. The Curriculum that we chose is not easy - it's been challenging and enjoyable for all of us to learn. I'm really glad that I spent the money and just bought it all from them so I have all the books when we need it. I'm glad that it's been deep enough for even me to enjoy. (There are tons of great curriculum's out there and anyone who has done the investigation knows that you could spend days and days and days trying to make a decision.)
6. Choosing a curriculum that tells me what to do every day. We don't follow the schedule exactly every day, but it's there to motivate me on the days that I'm not so motivated. If I were to just have some books, we wouldn't have done nearly as much stuff as we have been doing.
7. I've learned to read Usborne books. If you've ever been exposed to this brand of book before, you may love them. Generally before we started, I was not a big fan. There's so much information on a page, I didn't know how to read it. Do I read the regular text first and then all of the stuff around. Do I read the extra stuff around as we go? The curriculum that we chose uses Usborne books but we only read one spread a day. So we can spend time looking at the pictures and reading the text leisurely. I actually enjoy them now, but don't ask me to read more than one or two pages a day or I'll go crazy!
8. The great support and friends that I've had along the way. When I was first considering the home school thing after a very long time of flat out denying the fact that I would ever do it, I looked around at all of the people I knew that home schooled - Suzanne in TX, Jen in Kansas, Kim in Missouri, Sue in WI, lots of people in IA. Each one was doing it for their own reasons and taking it one year at a time...Once I made it to Rolla, the other moms have been really great friends to me!
9. Getting to know my boys more and know what they are exposed to. The days that we don't spend the entire day together (Wednesday and Thursday at a minimum), I hear so little about their day. I really can't imagine this being the case 5 days a week where I get a 30 second summary of the last 7 hours!
10. My home school choice is a year by year decision! Just because we are doing kindergarten for our first child this year doesn't tie me into any schooling decision for any future years for either of our children! I'm pretty sure that we will home school next year, but I'm only willing to make a decision for one year at a time! And we'll most likely take advantage of public school summer school again this year - aren't options great?
10. I have great students!

Summary - it's been great. We don't always have great days, but it was a great decision for us. I definitely know that it's not for everyone and in every situation but I'm very happy about the decision that we made.

The After Christmas Letter

I attempted to do some fancy HTML stuff but it's really my first attempt...the version in Word looks a lot better - that means I probably actually need to send out some letters and not just rely on this :)

2007 Year in Review

January

We rang in the New Year in Iowa City where we were currently residing with Todd’s brother, Jeff and his wife Narmin. Todd enrolled in one class at Kirkwood Community College while still working at CramerIT. Amy continued to work for Cerner two days a week from home. Andrew and John Lewis went to preschool two days a week and were just boys the rest of the time.

February

The boys and Amy made a trip to Alabama for an aunt’s funeral. We were glad that this was the last of our monthly streak of funerals for the year. On the way home, we hit 6 states and saw 6 grandparents in one very long day! We were happy to have a short reprieve from the single digit temps in Iowa but more importantly to support our family at the time of their loss. Amy also found somewhere to run indoors to stay in shape without freezing!

March/April

Sometime in the spring we decided to take the plunge for Todd to be a full-time student. In April we made a weekend trip to Rolla to buy a house. Amy’s parents were kind enough to corral the boys in the hotel while we looked, bid and signed contracts.

May

We hit a bump in the road when found out that Todd had been the victim of identify theft because we weren’t willing to pay off the Chevy Impala that was on his credit report. Many phone calls and some more phone calls and faxes and other faxes, thankfully this is resolved. Knowing who we really were, we packed up all of our things and said good-by to our friends we had made in Iowa over the previous 10 months and headed south to Rolla, Missouri. We moved into our home in a wonderful neighborhood. A few days later we headed to Kansas City for a neighborhood reunion.

June

Andrew attended summer school at the local public school with a class called “Around the world in 20 days”. Todd began his first classes at University of Missouri-Rolla with some of his fellow students from Kansas City. Our guest room had been used many times already and we enjoyed having company! We also became a one vehicle family – one non-human powered vehicle that is!

July

July found us starting our first adventures in home schooling! Through a lot of prayer and research, we decided that home school was the best option for us this year – Andrew’s first year of school. (I wanted to get started before the school year started in case it was a bust and we needed to send him to a conventional school!) We also started getting involved with a house church where we have settled.

August

August was Todd’s first semester of being a full-time student in about 15 years! He started hitting the books pretty hard right way as a junior in the Civil Engineering program.
Almost every day he biked the two miles to and from school! Amy ran a half marathon
in Chicago with some cousins after spending many many hours training.

September

The boys were able to start their new fall activities in September with AWANA, Wednesday School, Home School PE and Soccer. Wednesday School is run by a local church for home schooled children for a day of enrichment activities. Both of the boys can go and are even learning Chinese.

October

The fall seems like much more of a blur and earlier in the year as we settled into the school year routine and learning all our small town has to offer. The boys were able to go on a two week road trip with their Aunt Jenny seeing New Mexico and the Colorado desert. Amy met them in Kansas City for a weekend of hanging out with friends.

November

During the fall boys spent a week with each of their grandparents while Amy was doing some work stuff – training in Kansas City and a trade show in Chicago. Home schooling wasn’t a bust at all – it’s been a highlight of the year for mom at least. She has great students and they enjoy the learning. I think we’ll try it again next year, but it’s a decision to make for one year at a time!

December

The beginning of December meant the end of the semester and finals for Todd while the rest of the family supported him filling his brain to capacity. We must have been quite busy because we didn’t get around to putting the letter out until now! Our year has rounded out with good news. Todd was excited that he was shown favor by his professors when he got his semester grades. Amy was told that she will have a position at Cerner for at least three more months and not being eliminated on December 31^st.

We are most thankful for the favor that we have been shown by Jesus Christ to be His children. We are thankful for His sacrifice of coming to earth as a man to be crucified and resurrected for our short comings. This Christmas we celebrate the birth of Jesus as the beginning of his earthly life which is the foundation of our faith and hope!

Let Every Heart Prepare Him Room

I'm bustling tonight getting ready to leave tomorrow for our Christmas weekend events with my side of the family. There seems like so much to do, and I'm starting to get a little frazzled by it, but a line from "Joy to the World" has been rolling around in my head this Christmas season so I'm ready to take a breather and dump it out.

Joy to the World, the Lord is Come. Let Earth receive her King. Let every heart prepare HIM room...and heaven and nature sing...

My prayer for everyone this Christmas season is that each of you reading this message would prepare some room in your heart for Jesus. Christmas is the celebration of the birth of Jesus which is the start of his earthly live. The end result of his earthly life, death and reserection, means that those who believe and trust in him will be with him for eternity.

I don't think about eternity much, I've never been one to have a good focus on a real long term goal. Instead, I think about how making room for Jesus in my heart and trying to prepare more room for Him this Christmas season means to me everyday. Knowing that I can trust Jesus and put my faith in him, means that I don't need to worry about Cerner laying me off. I don't need to worry about Todd getting a job when he's done with school. I don't need to worry if I am doing enough for school for the boys or any of the other millions of things that I can worry about. I put my faith in Him because he has promised to always be there for me. He wants what is best for me as a child of his and how I can relate wanting the best for my children.

Please prepare some room in your heart this Christmas season and see how you can be blessed by Jesus being there.

Do you get to call in sick from homeschool?

I know stay at home parents don't have anyone to call in sick to, but had never really thought about it for homeschool and what happens when we're sick. Our first version of a sick day was this week, but it wasn't the teacher who was sick. The kids where sick and the teacher was tired!

The stomach flu invaded our house on Thursday night and only stayed for about 8 hours, but it was not a fun 8 hours at all. Friday rolls around as mom's day to do school after having two days off from being teacher but the kids are sick. One recovering from the stomach flu and the other with a pretty nasty cold (from teething, I really think).

So, what's the teacher to do? She has two sick kids on her hands and just a few hours of sleep. It's officially a school day but they don't go anywhere different for school, so can we just chuck it for the day? With all of those thoughts running through my head, and concerned that we still may have stomach flu waiting in the wings, we watched TV! We don't watch a lot of it, after not having any TV for months, we haven't been glued to the TV that much since we got cable. So Friday was a treat day to watch TV without stated limits. I didn't know what was on during the day for the kids, but PBS Kids has a pretty good lineup that they were happy with. John Lewis still doesn't understand live TV. He wants to watch what he wants to watch whenever he wants...the boys needs TEVO. We did find an episode of one show on the Internet since it wasn't on TV when he wanted. I skirted Cartoon Network for most of the day too!

Thank you also to www.learningpages.com for providing some winter worksheets for some non-tube activities. I snuck in some math and reading along the way (mostly for Andrew). We are currently reading Dr. Doolittle and they were happy to dig into a few chapters of that as well. So our day was pretty good - the boys really like some structure even on sick days.

I'm very thankful that the laundry is all done and that no one else has come down with the flu and that we have some very nice distractions at our disposal. I have come to realize that what each day ends up being is completely unpredictable, and that's just how life is...especially with homeschooling!

Amy, the meat packer?

Tuesday night I got a call and then an experience I could not have predicted. A friend called and said "I know that you don't eat meat, but others in your house do. We have a deer that someone gave us and we already have plenty in the freezer, do you want a deer?" Thinking of my meat eating husband, I said yes, and so later they arrived with a few trash bags. We received four leg quarters and the back strap. We put the legs straight into the freezer and I left the back strap meat out for Todd to figure out what he wanted to do. I was told that the back strap was the best meat and it was already de-boned.

A little while later, Todd arrived home from class and got to surprise him with our acquisition. Not what he was expecting to do after a full day of classes and a big test the next day! He decided to make small "roasts" out of the back strap and freeze the individual pieces for pulling out of the freezer when he wants it. I've been told that I can roast the legs and then make barbecue out of it or be adventurous and grind the meat to use in whatever. (In our house we don't use ground meat for whatever, so that would even be a whole new adventure.) I can't see me going the ground meat route but maybe trying the roasting thing and have lots of shredded meat. So if you eat at my house anytime soon, you may end up with deer meat however we end up cooking some of it. You'll have to let me know how it tastes! I'll happily be eating my vegetarian sloppy joe.

My other gastric experiment coming to our kitchen very soon is dandelion greens. I bought a box of organic produce from a local health food store and in the mix was dandelion greens. They are supposed to be really really good for you so we'll try them. I'm not a huge greens fan in general so I'm being stretched here. Most of the recipes that I have found on-line call for bacon and bacon grease to cut the bitterness of the greens. This may be another adventure for my meat eating friends to enjoy and I'll just get the pleasure of preparing it!

The tables are definitely turning on me this week as far as food - I'm usually the one trying to get people to try new things. Now I have two different foods presented to me and I'm skirting this issue!

Happy Eating.

Options I'm considering for dandelion greens:
http://find.myrecipes.com/recipes/recipefinder.dyn?action=displayRecipe&recipe_id=1571530
http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Doras-Dandelions/Detail.aspx