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November Update

So last week L7 told me at one point that he hates homeschool and he doesn’t want to do it. When I asked him if he’d rather go back to school after the year is up, he wouldn’t answer me. I realized in the moment he was frustrated, and may have said what he did out of frustration, but it’s hard to get him to talk about his feelings on things sometimes so I’m not sure where he stands at this point about homeschooling. I did manage to bring up how maybe he was frustrated with how long and drawn out our homeschool days seemed to be going. I suggested we really focus on getting what needs to be done, done straight away so that by lunch he can eat, play and do whatever else he’d like for the day. This translated into us doing some math, reading and history on Friday. Then I saw that L7 was getting antsy and frustrated that he wasn’t done with schooling for the day, so I backed off and let him have more free play time. The more I learn about homeschooling, the more I am trying to let go of
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Maiden Poetry Tea Time

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In the name of deschooling, we had our first of hopefully many poetry tea times recently. This is a really fun concept that I learned about while reading Julie Bogart’s book, The Brave Learner . I’m drawn to the idea because, who doesn’t love a tea party!? And if I can incorporate some poetry or other form of reading/learning to the experience, all the better! The kids were super excited for tea time when I let them know it was on the agenda yesterday. Just like the tea time of my own childhood, I substituted tea for things like juice, chocolate milk, etc. Whatever your kids enjoy drinking really. And we had a mixture of sweet and savory finger snacks to accompany the “tea”. I laid out some poetry books that I purchased with their curricula this year, as well as some poetry books from John’s collection. I just opened one of the kids’ poetry books and read to myself until I found a short, funny poem that I shared with them. This spurred a conversation about a form of short poetry:
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Gotta Start Somewhere

About Us I’m a Mom of 3. I have 2 boys: C10 and L7; and a girl: L2. Why are we homeschooling for a year? My eldest has ADHD and I believe he may also have dysgraphia. Suffice it to say I had heard from his school a lot about how he wasn’t completing things on time, and I saw first hand his struggles with memorizing math, and with any kind of writing when helping him with his homework. Add to this my 7 year old son who was just miserable all school year. Always complaining about how much he hates school. I don’t know if part of it was seasonal affective disorder, but I got the impression that school was as soul sucking for my middle child as it was for me as a child. I was inspired by family and friends who have and are homeschooling their kids to give it a shot for ourselves. I wanted to find a way for my kids to enjoy learning. I wanted to give them opportunities to learn more than what traditional schooling sets kids up to learn. I wanted my kids to have chances to find real pa
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