Well, as you may already know, especially if you follow my blog and have been reading lately, we decided to leave OHVA and k12 in October. What you may NOT know, however, is that for the past two weeks I have been fighting mono. Yes, our last week of OHVA and first week of independence I have been down for the count. It isn't much of an issue though, as we had decided as a family to give the girls some time to decompress from the pressure of OHVA academics and just enjoy life and learn to love one another and love learning. So, I was hoping that I'd be able to get up and running with our new curriculum today, but I made the decision to take the kids out Trick Or Treating up in Johnstown on Thursday night with my mother-in-law and Scott. The kids had a blast hitting our old neighborhood (we went down the street we lived on and saw all our old neighbors and friends, it was GREAT) and Scott and I enjoyed catching up for a few minutes with some of our friends and neighbors and seeing some of his family. The only way it could have been better would have been if my aunt, uncle, and cousins were going to be home that night so we could have stopped in to see them as well. But we see them at church when we can get there, so it isn't much of a big issue that we didn't see them that night. The girls got enough candy to make a dozen dentists faint, and they ate almost every bit of it within 3 days. Yes, I allowed total free reign over the candy, we had a full paper grocery sack of it and I just wanted it out before I gained 10lbs. So they gorged.
Now, onto our plans for this month. It will require a little information on what we have decided to do with the kids so that you can get a feel for the dynamic here.
I started my college classes up again last week, which is giving us an interesting feel to evenings. I tend to work on my schoolwork after supper, when my mind is usually sharpest and Scott is home to handle the kids. This works well for me, I dedicate 2-4 hours a night (depending on how busy we've been with chores and other things that need done during the day) and am keeping up pretty well for the most part. I have a draft of an essay due today, so I'll actually be working a good bit today on it during chores time since I've opted to attempt to do laundry today as my big chore. I say ATTEMPT because my washer, as much as I love it, has a sensor that is going bad and the part is on backorder for another week or two, so it won't do spin cycle sometimes and I have to let the machine sit a few hours to reset when that sensor malfunctions (what it does, it senses the water draining from my machine and tells the machine to do that high speed spin at the end of its final rinse, its a real pain when it doesn't work). My big goal for ME this month is to keep up and pass my college class, which will be a challenge because it is ENGLICH COMPOSITION 1 and I do *not* do well with English comp classes. I never got that foundational background in grammar and English despite going to one of the best public schools in the state as a child during the critical years for grammar development. However, I am a natural writer so I can muddle a B in this class pretty easily, I hope. I'll be happy with a C though, since this is one of my weaker areas.
For the girls, well we have a totally different plan. We are thinking of starting lessons up with them on a more official level around Thanksgiving possibly, to allow me to recover from my mono since Trick or Treat night set me back so badly (I was feeling pretty good Thursday, then Friday I felt like I got run over by a Mac truck again and still feel that way here on Monday morning). Here's what I have in mind when we do get started.
UNSCHOOLING.
Now, we're not going all-out radical unschooling here. I don't have the trust in my kids for that. HOWEVER, I will allow them to dictate what and when for academics. If they choose to spend a week or two focusing on math workbooks that I've got for them (Miquon for Missa, Horizons for Liddy) or a month working on lang arts worksheets (I have Explode the Code and Sonlight lang arts for them to do as they want), then that is fine. Since we love reading and books, I chose to purchase Sonlight core 1 to read daily to them. Core 1 is the first part of a 2-year world history program, and I am going to follow the guide mostly for this program as far as reading schedules go for each book. We may or may not use the timeline stuff, mapwork, and the discussion questions and such. I'm going to play it by ear mostly on that. Science, we're going to explore science books i have on hand from my earlier cores (core 1 is the 4th core I own, so we're pulling books from science P3/4, P4/5, and K as our exploration). We plan to learn a lot through living life and exploring, and throughv reading great books.
So, that's my plan. We're going to read books in P3/4 and core 1 this year, encourage the girls to do math and lang. arts at their pace and interest, and sxplore a lot of science books and topics. And we'll start once I'm over fighting this mono.
No comments:
Post a Comment