Refining It

I am enjoying this third year of homeschool since I feel like we have a good general framework and I can focus on refining habits and routines to make it work better for us. 

"Closing out" a month of homeschool, for us, means finishing filling out a reading log and a checklist of subjects covered, choosing work to save for the portfolio, adding photos to a digital album, and shredding all of the work we are done with and don't want to save. (Some of my children find it very satisfying to shred their work.) This has made compiling portfolios at the end of year a breeze. I look at the things we planned to cover but didn't, and decide if they should be bumped ahead to some future time or abandoned altogether. Over the past two and a half years I have drastically reduced my expectations for the quantity of work I plan for the children to do, but I still sometimes over plan. Writing the intended plans on paper has been very useful for keeping to reasonable amounts of work. Quality over quantity every time. If I am running out of space on my planning calendar, I know I'm planning too much. I am actually on my last sheet of blank monthly calendars, so I need to decide if I want to stick with the wall version, or buy a book with monthly spreads. The wall calendar is nice to have posted when we are home, but it's too bulky to take in the camper. 

A lot of our textbooks are digital at this point and I struggle with the amount of screen time this requires, although I love that I have access to literally everything on my phone through the Google Classroom app, and never have to print stuff out. The downside is that whenever you open a computer or iPad, the temptation is strong to check email, chat with grandparents, mess around with the Google Doodle....it's a real struggle for ALL of us. A few months ago we turned off pretty much all the filters, because they blocked out a lot of useful content, and I found myself spending half the day fiddling with settings. Now there is more work in paying attention to what the kids are doing on the computers, but this is time well spent in my opinion. 

I continue to love, love, love Brave Writer. There is a companion website to the products called Brave Learner and it is basically professional development for people homeschooling kids in their care. Last month the topic of video games really made me reconsider some of my long-held beliefs. I also like that, through using Brave Writer, I have come to understand home education/homeschooling as something the whole family participates in and not something I am doing to the kids. One thing that often floats into my mind is how different a teacher I would be with this current mindset, and also wondering how much of the pleasure of education is incompatible with the mechanics of school.