Easy and hard how-to's of homeschooling

The topic for today’s Blog Hop post is Work it Wednesday, the question facing is us this: How do we make it work? Whether it’s electives or finding what our children want to learn about, to finding inexpensive school supplies, figuring out high school or whatever. The bottom line is this: How do we make it work?

Well, quite frankly, one day at a time. There’s no other way to do it.

Friendships

This summer I made a goal that I didn’t tell my fellows about. I wanted my lad to be able to spend every week with a friend, or a perhaps hoped to be friend. Other than two weeks of summer I succeeded (and I’ve only next week to figure out if I can yet and if so.. it will only be ONE week of summer)! One friend a week since the middle of June. I was delighted. And SO was the lad! Good eh? Sometimes the lad doesn’t get to see his friends as much as he would like since we are generally about 40-60 minutes away from anyone!

The side-advantage that I hadn’t thought about was… every week this summer bar one, every time the lad visited with a friend, so did I! 🙂 WOOT WOOT! Friendships are good, in person is cool and has the benefits of shared laughter the rings across a room. On-line friendships are good too as they bring out another side of a person eh?

Electives:

I don’t really know how we add these in to be honest, they just seem to pop in. I think part of it is, is that we don’t have the same schedule every single day. I give the lad a schedule at the beginning of the month saying “this needs to be done three days a week, this twice, this once, this everyday” and let him run with it. If he sees something he wants to learn it just kinda happens. He’s a huge youtube lad and he’s been teaching himself physics lately so life happens. When something pops up that he really wants to learn and something can be replaced that we do and it’s no biggie, we replace. My goal is.. is he learning? Does he know how to learn? Can he learn from more than videos? Does he know how to double check facts if needed? Then what does it matter what he’s learning, as long as he’s learning!

If he needs help he needs to ask for it. Sometimes we start something and it’s a bust, so I have him persevere until everyone knows it a bust OR I find something better. And other times we start something and it’s such an inspiration it takes over our world for a while. It’s all good as it’s all just learning.

School Supplies?

Well frankly this is SO not an issue. When my mom’s church closed down about 7 years now???? Anyways, they had a TON of paper, pencils, scissors and stuff that needed to be moved out. Guess where it moved to? In fact we had so much stuff given to us that the town day care, other churches and some homeschooling friends benefitted. We still have paper, pencil crayons and scissors. Last year I finally said to a gal “you need stickers for your Sunday School? SURE I have tons.. and now I have WAY less stickers and her Sunday School saved money. I LOVE THAT STUFF. I’ve also benefited from people throwing out stuff and I just happen to be in the right place at the right time. It’s nice to get stuff for free and then keeping what we need (or sometimes just covet) and then passing the rest on…it’s a great thing to do. 🙂

What is most difficult?

I think the hardest thing I have at being consistent with is devotions together with the lad. I’m doing pretty good on my own (YAY GOD), but with the lad it’s harder. Part of it is that we eat when we’re hungry in this house. This means that just because I’m hungry and have made a meal doesn’t mean that anyone else is hungry. We don’t always eat together so having “meal-time devotions” like how I grew up doesn’t happen all that often. I’m starting to, at 730, to draw the lad aside and say “let’s do our Heidelberg”. It’s end of the day, usually we’ve all eaten by then and we’re starting to wind down for the day. This doesn’t always happen, as I said, we’re starting this. I think once summer is over and we get a student in for the semester this will add some regularity to our day and then devotions will happen more frequently eh? At least I hope so. 🙂 I know I don’t want to do what some homeschooling families do and add it as a requirement to homeschooling days/lessons. I want it to be a natural part of life.