Year One Memoir - Prologue

Our first homeschool year is drawing to a close. It's going out with a whimper rather than a bang, since we're slowly dropping subjects as I consider them "finished". All that remains for Zaya is vocabulary and history. Mim lacks Math, Spelling and History. (Zaya finished his math book yesterday.)

 There's no way we're going to finish Mim's spelling book this year, so I think we'll just keep using it and play a little catch-up next year. I don't think it's one of those subjects where you can just skip around, not if the words are following basic phonics rules as hers do.

 Our history would be done if Mommy would remember to sit and read a chapter every afternoon like she should have. The trouble is that we get distracted and I think, "We'll read that tomorrow. My voice is tired." Of course, my voice will also be tired by afternoon tomorrow. I'm not the best at pattern recognition. Maybe we should do history first for this last week and a half.

 All that being said, I don't plan for us to completely drop the learning process at any point this summer, we're just moving to a different view of school for a few months. I've told the kids that they can each choose what they want to learn each day, so long as they choose something. We'll see where this takes us. So far the new Garfield typing game seems to be winning.

We've had a great year, and I've never regretted the decision to teach the kids at home for even a moment. (I'm sure those moments will come at some point, I'm just saying they didn't this year.) Part of that is my memories of how crazy the last few years were with them both attending the little Christian school in W'ville. It was/is a wonderful school, but with tuition, the commute, Mim's daily tears and Zaya's frustrations in class, it just didn't work for us.

I remind the kids when they get whiny sometimes, "If you were still in your old school, you would have five hours left before you would be at home, and you would've already been there for two hours. I don't want to hear it. Go finish that last paper." I'm mean that way.

I plan some sort of wrap up post in the future, but for now, this is just to say: We are here. We are almost done with school. The experiment has been (thus far) a success.