engine repair).
Spend time in the kitchen cooking, developing recipes, or exploring a new cuisine. Breadmaking is chemistry, art, and culture all rolled into one neat and tasty package.
As you can see, these are all learning activities. They are not, however, academic subjects per se. You can still learn while allowing the children time to relax, catch their breath, and remember who they are.
Easing into coursework
When you do begin coursework, especially if you plan to use textbooks for your subjects, you may want to slowly work your way into a full day. (Remember that two-foot-high stack of textbooks mentioned earlier? I guarantee that all your students won’t approach that stack with as much glee as you do.) Going from an easy, relaxed day to all-textbooks-all-the-time is jarring at best, and you may find that it brings out the beast in your little beauties.
You have all year to get this material into the kids. And really … do we need to do spelling Every Single Week? (I admit it — I’m a spelling class rebel.) Looking at your 36-week calendar, or however long you have until the end of the year if you’re starting after a deschooling period, what strikes you as most important? What do you think would be the kids’ favorite subject?
With those answers in mind, start to think out your schedule. What if you started with their favorite subject first? (Radical, I know.) Do that subject only for a few days. Then, maybe on Thursday, introduce another class and do two classes for the remaining days of that week. First week: done! The next week, you add a third subject on Monday, and if you think they’re ready, a fourth on Wednesday. If not, go all week with three subjects. No one will die. No one. Not one person will swoon to the floor, never to move again, if the kids only experience three subjects by the end of week two.
I know you want to do it all right this second — I did too, when I started. Heck, I still want to do it all every single August. I love the start of the school year! Unfortunately, I love it more than any of my kids ever did. I learned to temper my overwhelming enthusiasm after looking into very glazed eyes the the first week of school.
Rebuilding Your Family Unit
Extreme stress pulls at a family’s seams. It tugs holes in the fabric you created when you gathered your little ones around you and taught them how to face the world together. You may find that you need to spend some time refashioning your family fashion fabric back into that sleek, gorgeous group that you used to be, before whatever stress happened that caused you to think about homeschooling in the first place.
Setting your schedule
Some families work best with a solid, unwavering schedule. Up at 7:30, breakfast, showers, math, language arts, lunch, reading, science, social studies, art, play time. Other families prefer a loose flow to their day: They get up whenever, have a late (or early) breakfast, and start school when everyone is gathered together. Or perhaps they start with the early bird and work more children into the day as they rise and begin to move.
Your family’s schedule will be your own. It may look like one of these. It probably won’t. I know that our schedule falls somewhere between the two, and yours may too. The important thing isn’t that you follow someone’s schedule. The important thing is that you discover and follow your own schedule — the schedule that fits your family the best.
Building your schedule works well with a little family input, especially if your children are old enough to hold opinons (and what children aren’t?). If you can put together a routine or daily task list that takes everyone’s preferences into account, your house will be filled with much happier campers.
Working together
One of the joys of homeschooling is the ability to work together on … well, almost everything. It’s fun to snuggle on the sofa and listen to someone read from this week’s book. If you like to cook, many hands together put dinner on the table in less time — even if it does create a mountain of mess that has to be cleaned later.
Some subjects lend themselves to cooperative effort. Poetry reading, art, some science experiments, reading aloud, music, and learning about the world in social studies can be tackled as a family group. (You could also tie everything together in a unit study. Read about them in Chapter 15.)
Outside of school hours, bringing everybody into family projects like bush trimming and weeding, painting the garage, or redecorating the living room (okay … which one of you wanted to paint all the walls purple and black?) helps to bring the family together. It’s a huge sigh of relief and accomplishment when you all stand together and look at a job all finished and well done — even if you did pull up all my raspberry bushes by mistake. Not that I’m pointing fingers at anyone.
Dad’s or Mom’s role in your homeschool
Homeschooling is a whole-family adventure. It doesn’t fit neatly into a Monday-through-Friday-from-8 a.m.-to-3:30 p.m. routine; instead, it becomes more of a lifestyle. Life itself becomes your classroom, and your children learn as they walk through it with you.
Much of what you teach them fits nowhere into your planning book: values, priorities, likes and dislikes — yet it’s learning, all the same. If they weren’t learning it from you, they’d certainly learn it from someone else. Aren’t you glad they learn it from you?
In much the same way, homeschooling involves more than the primary teaching parent. It incorporates everyone in the household, and sometimes the extended family as well — parents, siblings, and maybe even grandparents or cousins, depending on your family structure. Pulling everybody together
