I'm failing!

Dear Jennifer,

First, breathe. Your children have benefited from their years of home education more than you can imagine. Sometimes the fruit is slow in coming to maturation but it is there.

Boys are like this quite often. They don’t seem to really do well in areas like writing and grammar until they choose to engage and really want to learn the material. Actually, all people are this way. You can lead a child to a book or curriculum but you can’t really make them learn. As Charlotte Mason said-all education is self education.

Many experts would say that your boys are still to young to be much concerned with punctuation and grammar.

Honestly, if I were having the same issues, I would get back to the basics and focus on the goal of increasing my family’s love for learning.

My kids weren’t doing near that amount of curricula at those ages.

My kids chose what they wanted to learn about for science and they checked out books on those subjects and read through them at a pace of 15-20 minutes a day for those ages.

For history, we mostly just read (again, when my kids were those ages) living books, one after the other. I often let my kids take turns choosing the book to read. We chose a time period and enjoyed reading books from that period. I read them aloud to the whole family.

We didn’t do much grammar at all until my kids were in late middle school.

My kids began really began to mature in these areas around late middle school and then the growth through the high school years is astounding!

I could go on but the point is to just relax and get back to loving learning together. I would cut back to the bare minimum and focus on that because if everyone is hating school time, then not much learning is going to take place.

I usually read Ruth Beechick’s books when I find myself getting overwhelmed. I really love her book, A Biblical Home Education. You Can Teach Your Child Successfully is great as well.

Remember to do what works for your family. Find what fits and stick with it. While Charlotte Mason was an amazing lady with wonderful teaching methods, she wasn’t a mom with a houseful of children of different ages.

I love Charlotte Mason methods but doing so many subjects is stressful for me and my kids so we narrow down to the basics and enjoy the riches in a more relaxed manner.

You will be in my prayers today.

Blessings,

Melanie

Life of Fred has high school books too including chemistry, language arts, and  financial choices.

Cozy Grammar and Cozy Punctuation are light-hearted videos with exercises.  Our local library has most of the resources I mentioned.

http://blog.bravewriter.com/2016/12/28/popular-blog-posts-in-2016/

http://blog.bravewriter.com/2015/12/31/top-15-posts-of-2015/

mrsmccardell, I am thankful for your encouragement and I will read through the above blog posts.  We need help with our daily schedule/routine.  I would appreciate it if you would please yahoo email me at wherelearningabounds.

I’m rambling …. I don’t have time to organize these thoughts more eloquently so please take them with a grain of salt.  🙂

I’d echo Christie’s thoughts on boys too.  I have the same thing here.  A very sports oriented, task driven young man.  I only fret about it when I compare him to someone else.  Otherwise I’m head over heels crazy about the kid and every little thing he does in his boy way!

So, my advice – RELAX – we take a lot of time around here when we need it for emotional reasons, life reasons, it’s-a-really-beautiful-day reasons, we all have a great book reasons.  It’s important to focus on the QUALITY of your homeschooling and not the QUANTITY of material covered.  Who are you keeping up with anyway?  We homeschool honey!  WE define the schedule, the rules, the cannon, the focus, the everything.  Define your goal for each child – college entrance, etc. – then work toward that by any means that works.

Communicate with the kids.  They are people.  If they are well disciplined and your home is in a functional place then talk with them as you plan.  Ask them how they’d like to see this CM thing look.  Put your foot down that you are a CM family and then go from there.  What skin off your back is it if they want X book over Y book?  Both are good choices.  You’re not putting twaddle out there.  So, not an area to worry about in my mind.

Spelling comes.  Grammar comes.  My advice and method is to focus on reading (anything, all the time – the paper, books, novellas, poems, and yeah sometimes fluff) and the writing will come.  It’s slow sometimes and every child had their own pace.  Be happy and encouraging and don’t sweat it.  Unless there is a disability of some kind that needs addressing then just keep going.  I can say this because we have finally crossed the bridges that you’re on now.  I know how you feel.  I have posts on here freaking out about all sorts of the same things.  I’m really only calm now because I’m over those humps.  (I’m sure more are on the horizon, lol)

My son needed the freedom, for a while, to read whatever he liked so that he began to love reading.  After that I slowly introduced the good stuff … with his input …. and he’s a voracious reader now.  Sure, he gets bored with some books and isn’t a fan of others but he’s got the adventuresome bug to read and that’s what matters most.  I’m a big believer in EXPOSURE to the good stuff and lots of stuff and a WIDE variety of stuff too.  I’m naturally curious and I let that lead me as I expose my kids to things that they wouldn’t pick up.

On writing, I’m unconventional but it has worked for me so I’ll share it here.  I don’t buy any writing programs.  At. All.  My philosophy is that good writing comes from, well, writing!  And that good writing is easy to recognize as is bad writing.  Strong readers recognize this too.  So, I look at what they’re reading and I search the internet and find cool ideas, prompts, etc for writing about the things they are reading or studying.  I sort of decide at the first of the year how much I think they should write for each subject or overall and go from there.  I also feel that speech, recitation and oral presentations (narrations and otherwise) are very important factors in producing good writers.  I love this topic … I could go on and on but this gives you the idea.

I hope something here helps and you feel more relaxed.  Take that week.  Reevaluate if you think it would help.  Get their input and see what you all come up with together.