It’s that time of the year. Homeschooling conference time. In increasing numbers, all over the world, hapless homeschool moms emerge from their caves and trek to conferences and book fairs. There they dig through the latest offerings from publishers eager to grab a chunk of all those homeschooling dollars. We moms sit through seminars with blatantly fictional titles “Making Math FUN!!” “Diagramming Sentences Without Tears!” and look for new ideas to infuse into our efforts. After all, we’ve seen examples of work produced by homeschooled students….you know, the ones that DON’T live in our houses….we know it’s theoretically possible for homeschooled students to produce exceptional work. We’ve heard other moms speak in joyful tones of the pleasure their children take in all manner of educational activities. Surely if we just look hard enough and find the right ideas that will happen in our home too? Pretty please?
And so I headed out to the homeschool conference last weekend weary from another year of homeschooling. By this time in my homeschooling career, I know with certainty that the student work I see at these seminars and the stories I hear of “happy students” are tales of the bright days. The happy moments are “punctuation” marks in what is an exhausting lifestyle and sometimes the exhaustion clouds the the reasons you signed up for homeschooling in the first place. And so I headed for the conference hoping to find the means for adding some more punctuation marks to our run-on sentences. (Bet you didn’t think I could carry that metaphor to the end of the paragraph…did you?)
So what’s new in the battle plan for this year? Latin and timelines. I have decided that one of the parts of our school that consistently goes well is our observance of the Liturgy of the Hours. We start each day at 7 am with morning prayers (using Magificat). We have a brief prayer at 9 am and 10 am which is usually devoted to memorizing some passage of scripture or other already-written prayers. At 11:15 we read the day’s Mass readings and do our religious education which is generally reading aloud from a biography or other religious book and discussing it and at 3:00 pm we observe the Hour of Divine Mercy (and yes, I wear a little alarm clock to help keep us on schedule although I will confess that there are days when it does not go as smoothly as planned.) Now since it all goes so well and the children like it so much, naturally, in full violation of the principle of “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.”….I have decided to tinker with the best-loved part of our schoolday. We are going to tackle ecclesiastical Latin together. The kids are actually excited about this and I think the opportunity for combining learning Latin with memorizing scripture and other prayers will work well.
What is not working so well is my on-going struggle to teach the children to write or to master the mechanics of grammar. I go through language arts ideas like most homeschooling moms go through math curricula. I know what I’d like to teach, but we are so far from that I don’t think that those dreams will ever see daylight. I have everything on my shelves from Rod and Staff to Grammar Key. We just don’t seem to be able to make the progress I’d like. And so I’m giving up. Well I’m not really giving up. I’m attempting an end-run. We are going to drop instruction (and here instead of the word “drop” you may insert “scale back” because I don’t think I am capable of completely dropping all of the formal aspects of instruction) and beginning a campaign of learning by doing. In a seminar advocating the use of timelines and maps to help students retain historical and geographical concepts and I decided that this might be just the springboard I need to providing ample writing assignments. My theory is that the timeline figures combined with the Sonlight curriculum would provide basic assingments for person reports, event reports, place reports, book reports, and any other kind of writing I can dream up. These reports would then be filed with their associated timelines to form a notebook that should document their improvement through the year. Great theory right?
In other new plans….I bought an Encyclopedia Brittanica complete with a great book set to replace our 20 year old World Book set. The theory for this is that the encyclopedia will provide some additional reference material for these reports. The great books set comes with a topical index and I plan to add an additional 10 minutes of reading aloud from the great books to our daily religious education time. And….my oldest is starting algebra. I guess somewhere along the way he must have accidentally learned some math.
So how’s it working so far? They love Latin, are excited about the encyclopedias (although I have played up the great books aspect and not the reference material for reports angle), and the timelines….well there is a reason this entry is about battle plans not surviving contact with the enemy. We’ll see where we are next spring.
