I'm Back...again.

I'm probably the worst blogger ever when it comes to unexplained blogging sabbaticals. I haven't written since JULY! How crazy is that?! Here's the thing, stuff happened. I probably won't go into great detail on all the "stuff" but I'm back and here's a quick run down of what we've been up to...

*Most importantly, I'm still pregnant. We had a couple complications  (given my history, no real surprises there) but everything is going well now and I'm already huge which is good...mostly. 

*Joshua has a new civi job...this one takes a little explanation. His old civi job fired him. Yup. Fired. He's never been fired before and despite the fact that they always gave him glowing reviews and he's never had a complaint, they fired him...basically, they were tired of having to work around his Guard schedule and responsibilities so when he came back from his two week AT, they let him go. I wasn't surprised because they've been anti-military since day one but I was angry and if I think about it too much now, I'm still angry...but I'm also grateful. He hated that place. They were HORRIBLE. Not everyone who worked there of course but yeah, horrible is the only word for it. Just to give you an idea of the atmosphere, before he deployed they were interviewing people for an open position and he overheard one of the managers say that there was "no chance in hell we're hiring that guy-he's another Guard guy and that's the last thing we need." Then, when Joshua returned from deployment, several of his co-workers thought it was funny to surprise him with loud noises just to see if they could make him jump. Classy, right?! Anyway, I say I'm grateful because his new job is better. I mean it's not hard to be better than his old job but it's WAY better. Like God did an awesome thing better. The hours are a little odd but we're good with odd and he enjoys the work.

*We've started with our new homeschool group and curriculum-Classical Conversations if you're interested. It couldn't be going better. I'm tutoring the 4/5 yr old class which has been a blast and the boy is amazing us with how much he's learning. Actually, our little 2 yr old princess is even trying to get in on the action sometimes.

(1st day of CC-our homeschool group which meets once a week and our 1st day of homeschool at home-yup, in pjs)

(our favorite project this semester...we created a multi-level eco-system...I plan to write a post with more details to come but if you want to build one yourself, you can find the step-by-step tutorial we followed here)

*I was asked to be a pattern tester for a new "ruffle top" which I loved making but unfortunately in the process my sewing machine died :( so now I'm at a bit of a standstill when it comes to sewing.

(here's the finished project...once the pattern is available for purchase, I'll post a link to it)

*The boy is, at this very moment, on vacation with his grandparents at Disney World. I'm jealous. I'm really jealous. But I'm also really pregnant and on travel restrictions...kinda going crazy with cabin fever. I have, however, enjoyed the one-on-one time with our princess. We switched some of the kids furniture around in preparation for Baby 3.0 so now the princess is in a big girl bed and loving it-still waiting to find out the gender but Joshua's trying to convince me not to wait so we'll see if that changes.

That's been us the last couple of months. I plan on spending the next week reading all the blogs I love and have been missing to get caught up on your lives!

PS>I just got a pic from Grandma of our little man and a couple of his cousins at Disney World's Pirate's League...so wish I was with him!

Why Would You Not Send Them To School?!

I recently read an article about a family's decision to start homeschooling. More accurately, it was one woman's story of how she went from saying things like "That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard! The bus stops right here! It takes them away for eight luxurious hours of the day! Why would you not send them to school?" when she learned their new neighbors were homeschoolers to becoming an active proponent of homeschooling herself.

We only made the official decision to homeschool within the last year and although it was something we were strongly leaning towards for years, I wasn't always on board and Joshua REALLY wasn't sure of it. In fact, to say we were both anti-homeschool would be an understatement. Words like those kids, overly religious, under-educated, and freaky were tossed around like they weren't insulting, ignorant and rude. 

My first serious exposure to homeschooling came when I worked for a family with 10...yes, TEN children who technically practiced what's called un-schooling. I didn't like it. I saw deficiencies in their education but surprisingly, I also saw what it did for them as a family. I saw how close they were and how mature the children were. I saw how secure the parents were-they were totally open with me and I with them. I tried to be tactful about it when I told them I was "unsure" of the whole thing. I didn't understand it and didn't expect to do it when we had our own children. 

I was concerned about "socialization" because growing up in the public school system had taught me that my children HAD to be with other children of the same age. That gave them more "real-world experience" because they'd learn to work out problems with others in the classroom. Now, I see that being locked inside a school, forced to be silent for hours and unable to do the most basic things like go to the bathroom without first raising their hands does nothing to show them the real world. And in our son's case, it would have only led to bad behavior marks...he's an active four year old boy who needs the freedom to be able to study for a bit and then go outside, run, play, yell...basically, just be a child.

My next concern was what about subjects you're not (meaning the parents) naturally good at?--really I was wondering what I would possibly do with a child who needed to learn complex mathematical theories when I struggle with them myself. But eventually, I learned that the basis of homeschooling is to teach your children to teach themselves. To be independent. If there's a subject they need to learn that you're not comfortable with, you work through it together, or you find someone who can teach it to you both. It fit with our perspective of parenthood. We believe it's our job to prepare our children for the world-a world which is unfortunately putting America to shame academically.

I learned that despite spending more and more money-on average over $10,000 per year per student, America ranks 14th in reading, 17th in science and 25th in math (source: 2010 PISA). Homeschooling gives our children the academic advantage they desperately need in a global economy...

(graphic from homelifeacademy.com with source documentation HERE)

I also learned that a parent's dedication and hard work can overcome a lack of specialized training...

I began seeing children behaving in despicable ways. Talking to their parents with absolutely no respect. They weren't bad kids. They had good parents but they would go to school to be "socialized" and ended up just like everyone else...which I guess is one of the reasons people send their children to school. But it's not something we want anymore.

Deplorable behavior and inexcusably low test scores were only enough to make me seriously consider homeschooling. I still thought about ways we could avoid homeschooling because it scared me...we'd live in a "good" school district and I would supplement their education...we would be strict and would fight the negative influences...light inside the dark and all that but once we had our children and looked them in the eye, we realized that we couldn't accept something that wasn't the absolute best for them. Sending them to school wasn't the best academically or socially. It's not always easy and there are days that I think I'm in over my head but it's worth it-our kids are worth it and that's why we don't send them to school.

Whatever you decide to do, just remember before you say you could never homeschool, I said the same thing not too long ago and now, I wouldn't have it any other way.

Homeschooling...what do we do?

Several people have emailed and asked what exactly we're doing with homeschooling for the pre-K and Kindergarten years...like curriculum and schedules and all that. It's a question I've asked other homeschooling moms over the years and often got an ambiguous response and I'm starting to realize why. There's SO many things you can do that I think most people don't follow just one route. So, I thought I'd lay out what we're doing now and probably for the next couple years in the hopes that it might help someone else out there with a toddler who feels a little over their head but is considering homeschooling.

First of all, it's intimidating. You're not alone. I studied early childhood development in college, was a live-in nanny for triplets (often on duty 70-80 hours a week) and have worked with DHS kids who had been in and out of foster homes their whole life but the idea of educating my own children made me want to throw up...not because I didn't want to do it but because I didn't want to do it poorly. We're only a few weeks into the new schedule and I already feel so much more confident with it. I can see it working. I know better than anyone how much my son can handle...I know when he's had too much information or he's getting delirious with all the information or antsy sitting at the table and we stop. I send him outside to climb a tree or dig in the dirt and we do more later. If you're on the fence about homeschooling and specifically concerned about socialization or just want to know why we're NOT concerned about socialization, you NEED to read the blog post Weirdo which was admittedly written by one of my best real life friends. She does a great job in expanding on an article she read and gives her own personal experience.

The first book I read that has really laid out a clear route for us was "A Well-Trained Mind" which struck a cord with me because in my zeal to find a curriculum (something I was almost at the point of panic over when I first began looking into homeschooling), I started by looking into several homeschooling styles including unschooling, Montessori, and DVD/Video studies but in the end, the classical approach is the one that fits our family best. And that's really the best part about homeschooling, finding what fits you and your children best and running with it. With the classical approach, structured education is generally not pushed until the first grade and then education can be easily split into three stages each lasting four years. With that in mind, we expect to either start a classical curriculum with a co-op-type group such as Classical Conversations or perhaps send our son to a local blended classical school which has class two days a week where they introduce an excellant classical curriculum and the rest of the week is homeschooling and reinforcing what has been already introduced. The school claims 90% of the material is introduced there which as a first generation homeschooling mom, makes me feel so much better but it is a private school and comes with a private school price tag. It's something we could afford for the two children we have now but we hope to adopt many more children and even though the tuition isn't as pricey as most private schools because it's part time, it's not exactly cheap either. It's the big decision we have to make in the next two years.

In the meantime, we're preparing the boy at home. That's really the way we see the pre-K and Kindergarten years. The primary goal is to get him to read and read well. We're touching on the basics of other subjects but our focus is always reading. So here's our current schedule:

Monday, Wednesday and Friday: Reading, Writing, and Math

What we actually do: 

Until he's four, we're doing at least 10 mins a day for each (although for reading, it's usually something we're working on all day in one form or another). When he turns four, we'll bump it to at least 20 mins a day for each subject. And at four and a half, it will be 30 mins a day for each subject.

Reading: He doesn't read. Yet. That is our goal. So we spend our time going over letter recognition and sounds. We use flash cards without pictures because we want him to learn the letters themselves and not have to think of an apple first in order to think of the letter A. One of our favorite toys/tools is  his Leap Frog Letter Discoveries toy. It's great. It's not a leapster video game. It's a pad with all 26 letters as the buttons. Vowels are in red, consonants are in blue. There's four methods of "play" that (with the exception of the third) progressively get more difficult. The first is just the letter names. The second is the letter sounds but before it says the sound of the letter, it says the name of the letter. The third we don't use much for education...it's musical-each letter makes a different musical sound which is fun but not really helpful for learning to read. The last is a game where it tells the child to find a specific letter and then congratulates him when he does. We also bought the book, The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading which has been great but we're going pretty slowly through it. For example, the first five lessons are the vowels and they're great with going into short vowel sounds and why vowels are different than consonants (talking about how your teeth and tongue don't get used with vowels the way they do with consonants) but we're not doing a lesson in a day...it's more like a lesson a week because that's where our son is at and we're good with that.

Writing: He loves to draw. So we let him. I bought several of the large floor pads of drawing paper while Joshua was deployed (butcher paper would work just as well) so the boy could draw big pictures to send to Daddy. Now, we use it to draw shapes and letters. We also use the chalkboard side of his Step 2 Easel. We've started using proper handwriting paper but mostly we're getting the fundamentals of drawing straight lines, circles both clockwise and counter-clockwise (so he knows the difference) and all his shapes. Writing is just a lot of fun which is what all of homeschooling or schooling in general should be in my opinion.

Math: Counting. Lots and lots of counting. We count the number of smiley faces on his responsibility chart. We count his blocks. We count his sister's toes. We count everything. I also adjusted one of my favorite alphabet games (thank you pinterest!) that teaches matching upper and lower case alphabet letters by using Easter eggs to have a number written on top with a corresponding number of dots on the bottom half. It's been great! We're also starting to touch on monetary denominations and time...both of which Daddy has taken the lead on. Woo-hoo for Daddies that are involved.

Tuesday and Thursday: Art and Science

Art: We do a craft or art project like painting outside, making a tissue paper mosaic or going on a photo walk (I believe photography to be an art form and the boy loves it!). Basically, there's a million little art and craft ideas out there...all of which are on pinterest too so if you lack inspiration, you can always find something to do there.

Science: This one is totally Joshua and the boy. We bought the book Mudpies to Magnets which has well over 200 experiments-most of which using common, everyday materials we already have. We also have a membership to the OKC Science Museum and go as often as possible. Science is something both my husband and I love and we fully expect our kids will be just as enthralled if we introduce it early enough. For the record, right now, the science experiments are less about the boy learning about gravity and the laws of nature and more about instilling in him a love of learning science.

So, that's it. That's what we're doing...for now (we're always open to new ideas and improvements). Is it perfect? Probably not. Does it work perfectly for us? Absolutely. I'm by no means an expert but I just want to tell anyone else who is considering homeschooling that it's much more scary before you do it. It takes some work to get started and you have to find what works best for you but you can. There are so many tools out there now and so much support online and in community groups. 

Real Life is Scary

We're starting to get back into the swing of real life. Everything is still a little surreal but I've been so impressed and amazed at how well Joshua has done with the transition. He's learned to balance being a parent of two quicker than I expected and if I was totally honest, I'd say he's done it quicker than I did. We've enjoyed just hanging out, going on dates and spending time with friends. In many ways everyday since he's been home has been like a weekend...Saturdays and Sundays over and over. It's been wonderful but it's also been expensive and not very productive-both of which are totally fine by me. The time has gone faster than I wanted...there were a dozen other things I wanted to do and places I wanted to go before real life crept up on us but I think it's been exactly what it's needed to be and now, it's time to get to real life again. Joshua is slowly starting back at work and as of Monday, I'll start doing what I normally do...kids, sports/lessons, blogging...you know, the stay at home gig. We're shipping the boy to his Grandma's for the weekend and having some time alone with the baby.


Last night, as we were starting to come out of this deployment honeymoon and back into reality, Joshua and I were talking about the boy and what we want to do academically with him. We have one month before the public pre-K enrollment begins. Where we live the public elementary system is great but we've never been big on the idea of a public education in general. I've gone from being totally anti-homeschooling to preferring it. But it's intimidating. Really intimidating. In our research into homeschooling and the MANY different ways to do it, we've come across that ever-important homeschooling guide...A Well-Trained Mind. We've read through the applicable areas and a few other homeschooling books that advocate other methods but have come to the conclusion that we are solidly on board with the classical curriculum route. With a classical curriculum most of the real instruction begins in 1st grade. Pre-K and Kindergarten are used to introduce reading and phonics. So the first step for us is to introduce reading...maybe introduce reading is the wrong terminology because we've been reading to the boy since before he was born but we haven't made a concerted effort to really explain phonetics and explain all the letters. We've just let him lead the way-which btw is another homeschooling educational philosophy...it's called unschooling and although we were content with it up until now (the boy's three and a half) it's not a method we want to use throughout his education. At the same time, we don't want to just jump into a rigid academic schedule. We want to introduce reading but reading, in my opinion, is a lot like potty training. If you push it too early, it's only going to end up in disaster for everyone if the kid isn't ready. Some kids are just ready sooner than others. So, I ended up with an amazon cart with a handful of helpful phonics workbooks but I didn't order them last night because I wasn't sure the boy was ready. And then, this morning the first thing he said to me was "Mommy will you help me read my Elmo book..." not, "will you read it to me." It may be a small difference but to me, it was huge. It was confirmation. He's ready...or at least, he's open to reading on his own so I'm going to order the phonics workbooks. Gulp.


My stomach is in my throat and I'm scared I might fail him but I guess that's real life and it's time to embrace it. Can't be worse than deployment...right?!