homeschool this week

I have been homeschooling at least one child in our family for the past six years.

It took me a long time to realize that homeschool

(school at my house)

did not have to resemble main stream school in any way.

I didn’t have to set up desks or ring a bell or take traditional tests or teach four years of history covering only the Civil War.

I didn’t need a dress code and lessons need not be fifty-two minutes in length, eight times a day.

And now I am in the middle of continually realizing that my homeschool

(school at my house)

need not resemble anyone else’s homeschool either.

I don’t need to have color-coded charts on the wall and a cubby for every child.

I don’t have to teach in the mornings and take the afternoons easy and I don’t have to have an outline for each day’s activities or always complete history on the same day each week or complete every lesson in the science book.

Isn’t that the beauty, the charm, of school at home?

I don’t have to do it your way.

I can do it our way.

What works best for our family.

For that year.

Or that season of life.

Or that month.

I get to be in control of that.

And it’s scary and it’s overwhelming and it’s humbling.

But it’s good, too.

I know it’s a process.

A journey.

And, let me tell you, I am not opposed to any of the methods or ideas I listed above.

I’m not anti-desk.  I don’t refuse to study the Civil War.  I don’t think bells are wrong and I have no problems with cubbies or color-coding.

But every year at this time,

I get a little out of sorts about homeschool.

I get anxious as my inbox fills up with notices of curriculum for sale and upcoming classes to take and end-of-year paperwork to complete and the myriad of choices out there for homeschoolers now.

And from their catalogues, they all look shiny and successful.

And I want to lay down eight credit cards and order everything I see.

I want to ask everyone I know how they manage homeschool at their homes.

And then I want to copy them.

All of them.

But that is not the point.

What works at your house may not work at mine.

And the bewildering, beautiful truth is . . .

what works at my house this year may not work at my house next year.

Homeschooling is ever evolving for me.

Particularly with the steadily changing dynamic of younger children and the chaos they bring with their tiny bodies.

This week, for example, we have shifted our schedule dramatically.

A smidgen of genuine school work in the morning hours.

Long, full days of playing in that sandbox and splashing in two too-small kiddie pools.

And then,

once Wilde Fox has rested his blonde head in his crib for an early bedtime,

the big kids and I romp through read-alouds and nature journals and notebook work.

It’s lovely.

They earn the privilege of staying up an hour later.

I receive quiet time of instruction without interruption.

And everyone sleeps a little later the next morning.

And that fits us perfectly.

For this week, anyway.