You’ve spent months researching options and curriculum, poured over your schedule for hours each month, and dedicated many days to organizing to be sure you’d have solid footing for the coming school year.
What do you do when the homeschool year just doesn’t go as planned?
I started our 2012-2013 school year with so much hope and a strong belief that this year would be a success, this year would run smoothly.
I should know by now that my plans and God’s plans do not always meet where I think they will.
I had spent so much time ensuring we were organized and ready to hit the ground running, and we did just that when we began last July. But then I found out we were expecting a baby. Morning (ha! more like all afternoon and night) sickness and extreme fatigue hit, so we took it easy for the remainder of the summer. We geared back up in September to knock a few weeks out before our Disney vacation. We had an amazing time and made incredible memories (which unfortunately have not yet had a chance to share with you all) and even incorporated some learning on that adventure. When we returned home things got derailed by the Super Storm Sandy. We were safe but my parents home was hit hard and we decided it was best to suspend schooling so that I could be closer to my family and help as I could. We got back to the books when we settled back home but we were of course heading right into the holiday season which we normally take at a much slower pace to allow us to prepare for the holidays and Vince was away visiting family in Panama. Those things did not make a good combination for consistent schooling. In the new year we tackled our studies once again knowing that our new addition would be arriving in March. We took some time off to adjust to life with a newborn and started back to school mid-April.
Now May is here and my end of year review is happening.
I know that what I see in their portfolios is not an accurate representation of what my children learned this year.
- Worksheets don’t explain what it means to serve family members in a time of great need.
- There isn’t an easy way to document how your older children helped out with their younger siblings when you weren’t feeling well.
- You can’t fully capture what it’s like to walk around a 340 year old fort and touch huge cannons with a 2nd grade vocabulary.
- Learning to care for a newborn isn’t usually covered in the 3rd or 5th grade health books.
My children have had lessons in their lives that most of their peers won’t have for another decade.
However, I don’t want to get caught in the trap of justifying and qualifying any lack in academics.
Our goal in homeschooling isn’t to breed geniuses, but to raise avid learners.
Lately I’ve seen that their work ethic is very poor and my own lack of consistency is mostly to blame. In striving to “do the next thing” I became a box-checker, too dependent on our curriculum and watching as all joy diminished from our schooling.
Where do we go from here?
It’s time to end this school year.
We all need a reset. A fresh start. We need to walk away from the books we’ve stared at for the past two years and start pursuing things that bring delight back into all our eyes! I’m looking forward to breaking away from an inclusive curriculum and using some of the great resources that I’ve had to shelve when I couldn’t fit them into our very-filled but un-fun days.
We’re ready to move forward.
We’ll use the remainder of May to finish getting set for our new start and we’ll kick off shortly after. Schooling year-round with shorter breaks spread out throughout the year will serve us better than taking a long summer break and fighting more bad habits if holding out until the fall.
I don’t feel defeated, instead I feel like I have a challenge set before me to revive our homeschool and set a course that will bring us both success and joy!
How did your school year go? Was it a smooth path or were you also hit with unseen turns in the road?
How are you preparing to move forward?
**Disclosure: Some of the links in this post are affiliate links and are marked as such (so is the banner below) and if you purchase after clicking those links we will receive a small portion of that sale, others are links to companies that have donated their products to our homeschool in exchange for sharing with youhow we use them in our home and no further compensation is received. As always I only share my honest opinion of these products and only give authentic recommendations.**
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