Homeschooling in the Trenches
The boys are doing standardized testing online this week. This is the time of year that I always usually question whether we’ve done enough, done well, done the right things, etc. If you’re a homeschool mom I assume you’ve known those feelings at some point. This end-of-the-school-year feels much different. We have seven children now and only three of them are schooling. The rest require my constant attention while they’re awake. That makes schooling quite difficult.
We’re on auto-pilot for things like reading, math, and spelling because the boys do those things alone and/or on the computer. But what about the rest? What about all of the things I’d like to be doing on top of math, reading, and spelling?
Memory Work, Poetry, Shakespeare, Bible Memory, Science, Art, Grammar, and Writing?
We’re trying new things as we homeschool in the trenches for a little while. I imagine by the end of the summer we’ll begin to settle in to an excellent routine that will work well for us for the fall. Until then we will have lots of read aloud time for poetry and Shakespeare. We’re going through A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson and The Young Reader’s Shakespeare version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. We will listen to the remainder of our anatomy and physiology science through an audio version of our textbook, we’ll listen to our memory work in the car, and we’ll slowly figure out how to add grammar, writing, and art back into our schedule. I know from experience that it’s far better to do a few things with excellence than to pile things on your plate and do them all with mediocrity. We’re pretty much doing all of our normal daily tasks from the trenches right now; school, church, meals, chores. I’m sure the list goes on. However, I know at the end of the day the most important thing is to make our home a pleasant, God-honoring, grace-filled place so that remains my goal. We will look for truth, beauty, and goodness even in the mundane and even in the trenches.
Our Current Read Alouds