Our Homeschool Journey, Part 2

Try as I might, I couldn't find the original picture of a 14-year-old me and a 16-year-old him in the homeschool co-op where we met.  But here is a very smudgy picture of our wedding slideshow that featured the original.  It's the best I can do.  I'm the one in overalls and Jeremy's in the totally awesome chambray button-up.  Look, we match.

We weren't remotely interested in each other until three years later.

Fast-forwarding 16 years later, this is what the kids and I worked on yesterday.

They decorated the outsides, I filled the insides with bank lesson plans waiting to be filled.  Protected against time, we'll keep monthly "work samples" (or pictures of work samples, if it's not in paper form) from this year.  Sure, they will work as record-keeping files, but I like to see it as more like memory books.  Portfolios.  Treasure chests.  More on present day tomorrow.  And that's one of the most erroneous sentences I've ever written.  I are a home-schooling mom...

So starting from where I left off yesterday, after two years with CAVA and living, pretty much in isolation for two years, we moved a few hours up north to where we are now.  Home.  Happy.  Happy home.  We love where we are.  We fit where we are.  Last year, when school time rolled around again, we were still meeting our new community, and several families from our church enrolled their kids in a charter school that was a bit of a hybrid.  The kids went to a classroom twice a week for half a day and were educated at home for the rest of the time.  It sounded like a great way to meet more homeschooling families and presented opportunities for my kids to make new friends.

My daughter is the most extraverted person I have ever met in my entire life.  She loved the social aspect of the classroom setting.  My son dreaded it.  They were both enraptured my experiencing two field trips where they got to ride in a school bus.  An actual school bus.  In fact, when I informed them this year that we weren't reenrolling with the charter school, they both said they'd miss the school bus trips (all two of them) most of all.  They both gagged down the curriculum, as did I.  I really wanted to supplement the curriculum more, but fulfilling our commitments with the charter school's requirements was important to me and by the time we had done that, we were all ready for the school day to end.  All-in-all, there were many great experiences and lots of learning situations we worked through on the social side of things.  But... I still wasn't the one deciding what and how my children would learn, and that had been burning in my heart from the beginning.

Now, as we enter into our fourth year of homeschooling, we are in a healthy, stable enough place to do what's been in our hearts all along.  More on that next time...