One Month Of Home School

Tomorrow marks four complete weeks of home school. For the most part, we are enjoying this new phase of life, although there are days I feel positively smothered! One day when I was second guessing our decision to home school, I read over some emails I sent to a friend last fall. I quickly decided that yes, we did make the right decision! 

   A year ago Joseph ran away - as in down our long drive and onto the road where a neighbor stopped him, he was melting down at school, refusing to work and spent his evenings raging because he was overstimulated. This year he is much calmer, in fact I think he is as emotionally stable as he was during the summer. Of course we have days where the work doesn't go so well. On those days I have him do only the bare minimum and then try to catch up another day. I need to email our supervisor and see if we can revamp his curriculum. His testing showed he was ready for 4th grade but the books are proving a bit too difficult which makes him frustrated. 

Kiana and Tristan are also doing well with home school. We had, and will continue to have, some rough spots but all in all I think it is a good fit for our family at this time.

We cleaned out a small bathroom/storage room and Dean put in some shelves and a filing cabinet. Now I have a place to store all my books and school supplies. That closet made school much more fun for me. I had been keeping all the books in a box and it was frustrating digging through the stacks trying to find the correct book and answer key. Now I go to my shelf and flip through the books until I find the correct one.

The children continue to do most of their work at the kitchen table with the exception of tests which I have them  do in their bedrooms. I used to try to do housework while they did their school work but soon gave that up. Now I sit at the table with them, answer questions, grade their lessons and remind certain people umpteen times to, "Keep at your work!"

I like the flexibility home school brings to our schedule. If we were up late the night before I can let the children sleep in or if we have something planned for the day, we begin school earlier.