I cannot believe I'm about to have a 3rd grader! Since we homeschool, we can decide when we go back to start. We decided that we're going to start next Monday, July 31st. A local co-op is going to meeting at our church this coming year and we joined it. It starts back up the first Friday of August, so we decided we'll start the same week. My daughter will be in preschool and my youngest with tot school. It's going to be a great year!
I don't talk about the challenges of homeschooling much. But trust me, they exist! There's a reason more people don't homeschool. Spending everyday, all day, with your children, can be quite challenging. Last year was rough! I am not going to lie. There were more days than I would like to admit that I was ready to throw in the towel and enroll my oldest in the local school. If it wasn't for my husband's encouragement, I may have! My darling son, whom I dearly love, decided to have quite an attitude and made teaching him not as fun as in the past. He started complaining and wanted to be lazy. That and having two really young kids made homeschooling very challenging. To top it off, we decided to buy an old house, have it renovated, and sell our first house that we rented out for 8 years, plus sell our house we had lived in for 5 years. It was quite a year! The whole process took a little over 6 months. We've been in the farm house now almost 3 months and are finally settling in.
Here are my goals for this coming year:
Put my children's hearts first. My biggest goal above all is that my children grow in love and the likeness of Christ Jesus. That they know they are loved by God and are loved by their parents. I'm a pretty strict teacher, which is great in a classroom full of kids, but might not be as great when I have just a few students, who are also my children. This coming year, I'm going to try and look at the heart of the matter the most. If we're having a really bad day or a super hard day, I'm going to pray about it and see what else is going on in our lives and adjust accordingly. My kids' hearts come before academic success. My children NEED to know I LOVE them. I feel like I didn't express that enough to them last year.
Keep it fun! This was my goal when my oldest was younger. Then I got all serious and probably just worn out from all the things that come with having baby after baby and dealing with the doubling of housework. It's a shame really. School should be fun. I mean why not, right? My oldest son's personality includes wanting to have fun and wanting to make sure EVERYONE is having fun. He's a big includer like his mom and dad. A friend of mine brought up looking at gameschooling. Not gameschooling as in just playing educational games online but actually playing more educational games with one another. Games like Uno and Monopoly, but there are a ton more. Make games and songs out of the schoolwork and keep it light and fun. So I'm planning on making our school days more fun.
Host more playdates. We started inviting more people over toward the end of summer and have really enjoyed it. I'm hoping to get together with our friends more outside of co-ops than we did last year. Pretty much we stopped having people over, apart from life group, while we were getting our house ready to sell and through the selling part of it. We enjoy having people over and we want our friends and children's friends to always feel welcome when they come over.
That's pretty much it! What about academic success? That's definitely an important thing and we are going to be learning a ton. I honestly don't fear that my children won't gain all the knowledge they to succeed in life and more! I'll update you with what we're doing for each kid in a few days. And just to be extra clear, I do love homeschooling, even with all of the challenges that come with it. Each year we pray and talk about what we should do the following year. And for now, we're going to continue homeschooling.
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