Still burned out...but some peace.

Still burned out...but some peace.

Yup, I'm still burned out but I think its gonna be okay. I've been homeschooling for almost 4 years now and none of those years have "looked" like the pictures you see in the magazines or reviews. I have gone thru a being manic and trying to "out do" and out smart other homeschoolers, to being burned out and angry and well...honestly. Not doing ANY thing that looks like being school and I do mean NOTHING. And now (surprise)I'm somewhere different.

My goals for my children have had a radical shift. My ultimate"goal" for my children is to get them to heaven...not college. Not that I'm saying they do not need to be educated, they do. However I finally have some peace. I'm going with simple. I still love Sonlight and I have learned how it will best work in our family ( Just simply reading 1 book at a time till we finish it and no longer using the IG) And I enolled the kids in Christian Light Education Homeschool Plus program.....Its like a breath of fresh air and I can finally catch my breath. I know it won't always be picture perfect but at least now I can take pictures.....

Coming back to Sonlight...Kinda

Well some time has passed since Addy's birth 1yr to be exact. I have been using Ace paces for Ailey and Ayden for a year now, they have been amazing for teaching a 6 and 7 year old how to read granted I am also using Sonlight's Reader's 1 that uses I Can Read series along with Explode the Code as well as Abeka's Reading program.....I know it sounds like a lot but it seems to work nicely and learning to read is just SO important!

Ayden started having Petit Mal seizure's, a typical day consists of between 5 and 15 through out the school day so this slows us down quite a bit and I don't know when we will be done . I had wanted to keep to the typical school year but I don't think we will be done until next December.....It's kinda of freaking me out!

Alora...Ugh I don't know what to say, I'm worried and full of shame...She is almost 11 and in 5th grade this year, and "using" Switch on School House...and yes I'm using that term lightly she's only done maybe about 3 weeks of work on it...she so far behind now. What do I do? I don't know If I can get her caught up and I don't know how to get her motivated to do her work! I'm very angry about it, not really feeling like talking about it right now though...

So....with some utter failures in teaching this year...I was so overwhelmed with Sonlight when I first started using it I wanted to check off every box, Language arts didn't seem up to par and didn't make sense to me then, I was worried they were not learnig everything they were suppossed to and I moved on to "better" box curriculums..HA! Well I think your getting the picture of how well my school year has gone with out using Sonlight, I think I gonna pull out my Core 5 and Core K and start again but this time I don't think I will be so manic and OCD about it, instead of trying to check off the boxes daily I'm gonna go for the if we finish that box "good".... if not we'll do it tommorrow thing.

We'll see how it goes......And yes I know this entry was all over the place, my apologies to the reader. But I do think it helped my brain to sort some stuff out.

12 weeks left in our school year......And I go and change EVERYTHING!!!!!! Now because we have had some major changes in our house it was necessary...Our 5th child was born on 1/13/2010 10 weeks premature by emergency C-Section. I was already feeling overwhelmed with Sonlight but with Adalyn's birth I had to change everything again as she was in the NICU all the way down in Sacramento For 5 weeks and there was no way "school" was gonna happen during this time so go figure the curriculum I have looked at time and again and always ended up dismissing because I "thought" it was too easy..... I have fallen in love with!

Here are some reason's....While yes I am a total boxchecker and Sonlight provides me with those boxes I found myself not wanting to do "school" because there was sooo much to do every day!! We constantly going from book to book and having to buy individual books for every subject,Vocab, spelling,handwriting,writing,math,blahblahblah the list is endless and overwhelming BUT I still LOVE Sonlight Reading,History and Science books and will continue to buy them but I'm ditching the rest of their curriculum.....Which brings me to A.C.E Paces...I give Alora 7 Paces that are Math, English, Word Building, Literature and Writing, Social Studies, Science and Bible, Each "pace" is about 39 pages long, she does about 5 pages a day out of each subject which includes and weaves all of the tedious subjects like vocab, spelling, handwriting, reading, etc....It's all self teaching she just does her pages writes down how many she'll do the next day and we get to move on with our day and life! That's a bit simplified but that's what I wanted and need right now SIMPLE!

Update on choice...

O.k. so It's been some time since I last wrote and after quite a bit more researching and praying and actually trying out another curriculum (A2 to be exact) I went with the Literature based Curriculum Sonlight instead, I bought Core K with K -1 readers, Science K for Ayden & Ailey and Core 5, LA 5, Science 3 for Alora, I'll break it down further on another post....Now please understand I still recommend A2 however I found that I am a "box checker" I need to physically see what I need to do and need it planned out for me, A2 does not provide this, I felt as if I were in a vast ocean on a little raft...That being said it was and is a great resource for supplementing Sonlight with older ,vintage, unabridged books.

So far we are in week three in Sonlight..It has been alot of fun but also a lot of work, I really wanted more of a hands off approach but the more hands off I got the got the guiltier I felt, I realized you can't have your cake and eat it too. But I definitely Love Sonlight it was so worth the money!

Our Curriculum....

After Many late nights, racking my brain going back and forth.....I think I've finally realized I'm a "curriculum junkie". There are so many amazing programs it's difficult to choose or there just isn't enough time in the day. So after all my research of all the different philosophy's out there this is how it has broken down for my family.

I began knowing that I wanted to stay with "Trivium" of classical methodology.."Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric" however the compilation of Classical curriculum available from sources such as http://www.veritaspress.com/ ,or http://www.logosschool.com/ or http://www.greatbooksacademy.org/ are expensive when you have to buy for 3 children and every item is teacher lead.... not an easy thing to do with multiple grades.....So then I looked into http://www.sonlight.com/ it looked as though it would be rigorous and bonus I could teach multiple children with one course but it would need alot of tweaking to be made Classical and again alot of preparation on my part everyday....And again I started looking around and found christian based workbooks from ACE and LIFEPAC they sounded great self teaching and bible based,but the more I looked at it it was soooo dumbed down.....

So Now I was looking for self teaching curriculum and of course I find it ..But to my surprise, It is not watered down and its far above the levels of current schools (our old private school as well) and is easily adaptable to the classical timeline....So we use http://www.oldfashionededucation.com/ as our base added in some A2 and RC which basically teaches only "math, reading and writing" History and Science are lumped into reading..but it is not revisionist views and NOT politically correct Hogwash............I'm following RC's timeline view for Math and Science which ends with Calculus between 14 and 16... before moving on to college Physics..We also are following http://www.greatbooksacademy.org/ reading list for future enrollment into the Great books High School..........all of this is ......by the way is self teaching..... which you can learn more about at http://www.robinsoncurriculum.com/ or http://www.accelerated-achievement.com/ be aware that if you purchase either one of those there is no set course of study which is why I use OFE as a baseline....And now you know my experience at finding our curriculum hopefully it will help you! Well ...off to read a book!

The Beginning..

This is how Home schooling started for us...Our children attended VCCS in Phoenix AZ. We loved this school we thought we would be there forever......However there was a little nag in my brain..I ignored it...When we found out my husband would be getting a promotion. We looked in to free charter schools..This would not work..They wanted to skip her to 5th or 6th grade ....an 8 year old does not belong in a 5th or 6th grade class..Again my little nag surfaced..and is now yelling at me!!! The only logical choice for our children to continue to receive a Classical Education is to you guessed it...HOME SCHOOL!! And as for my nag.....The Lord sure is persistent when he knows what's best for us!