Are you curious about the home-schooling?

Ah, yes, so we're homeschooling and I know you are curious because everyone asks, but the leading question is usually something about curriculum, which is, frankly, boring to talk about, so the conversation fizzles. 

What I think you really mean is "How do you spend your days? Do your kids listen to you? How do you decide what they should learn? Do you teach all the subjects? Are you paying tutors? Are they playing video games all day? Do they annoy you? Are they above grade level? Below grade level? How do you test them? How much are they reading? Do you give them homework? Will they be able to get into college? Is it better than school? Is it worse than school? Could I do it?"

And truthfully, I would love to talk about it to anyone. There's an incredible amount of freedom and flexibility and that can be daunting. I know we haven't hit our stride....yet. However, I can see it coming. 

I did make some decisions about curricula at the beginning of the summer. Spectrum workbooks and Khan Academy for math. Wilson Reading for any spelling and phonics issues. Core Knowledge Series textbooks for language arts, social studies and science. There are 12 required subjects, which I dutifully check off each time I feel I have provided some meaningful instruction. But this never feels like the meat of their learning for the day. I think it does serve to anchor us a bit and I do usually squeeze in what I needed to, but this is what actually happened:

Max built a 100 piece puzzle with help. Marko and Laurel did some math workbook pages.  Laurel and I looked at paragraph indentation choices in a number of books. I made an accordion book and then there was a flurry of crafting and I don't know where any of the finished products ended up, but they were all making little books and collages. Everyone played Minecraft. I played two rounds of Uno with the boys. Laurel made approximately 1,000 rainbow loom bracelets. She read a lot of graphic novels. We had a tea party and discussed the composer Debussy and whether or not "Impressionist" could be considered an insult, and how his music sounded like Chopin, or did it? We went to a library homeschool group and Marko and Laurel made little water color sketches of squash, corn and beans. It snowed on and off all day and they all went outside and played in the backyard for little chunks of time. I would have taken them to the park but our new snow/rain boots have not arrived yet. So they just wore their sneakers and dried them out in between. We decided to stop reading Pax (getting too scary and violet for some of us) and to begin reading Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. I have a Brave Writer unit plan to go along with that novel so we'll see how that language arts approach works for us. Marko read a lot of Star Wars books and then checked out even more Star Wars books at the library. I found a book on Islam with a lot of pictures to go with the unit Laurel is reading in the Core Knowledge textbook. We listened to a podcast called Tumble and the episode was about peregrine falcons. Marko practiced the next phone number he is trying to memorize. We read some more poems from The Lost Words by Robert MacFarlane nad Jackie Morris. We cut open the massive osage ball I found on my hike over the weekend. It looks tropical, they said. And then put it outside to see if the squirrels would take the seeds out of it. We tried our hand at sketching the osage ball using nature sketching principles but our colored pencils are very dull at the moment and the pencil sharpener was not effective at bringing them back. Marko made some attempts to fix his helicopter wing with tape, and failed. He watched some youtube videos that showed a guy fixing the wing by tracing it onto a shampoo bottle and then cutting out a replacement wing. The videos were all in French, but it was the exact same helicopter! We don't have an empty shampoo bottle yet, though, so this also failed. Sometimes there is a lot of failure and I think that's my favorite part of homeschool. Not that they failed, but that we have the space and time to fail. I think he'll probably keep working on that helicopter tomorrow. 

So that's the current status.