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Prayer Request from Sonya
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Thanks Sonya. Sounds like a great topic. My heart resonates with this subject and I look forward to hearing what God provides for you.
Blessings and praying.
This is much needed guidance for homeschool moms. Great idea! Thankfully, I was given this advice early on and was also able to find SCM’s Early Years guide. It has set the course for our homeschool and everyone is happy. 🙂
We need to also pray for the mothers to have open hearts and minds to Sonya’s message…..for the children’s sake. Enough with the burdensome overloading of schedules. Let the children be children.
I’ll be praying for you too, Sonya, that your thoughts are arranged by the Lord. Your topic reminded me of one of C.S. Lewis’ famous quotes about education from Surprised By Joy: “…the greatest service we can do to education today is to teach fewer subjects. No one has time to do more than a very few things well before he is twenty, and when we force a boy to be a mediocrity in a dozen subjects, we destroy his standards, perhaps for life.”
My sister gave me similar advice this week when she suggested that I simplify my homeschool and teach to my children’s individual weaknesses instead of strengths. This means, for one or two of my children, that they will be focusing more on math and science than literature (as a school subject) since they are reading constantly. Another child will need to work more on developing his language arts skills since he is a late bloomer as far as learning to read (yet he is a science encyclopedia and math whiz).
I am also praying for you Sonya. I have heard the saying “start slow and then ease up” some where in the past few years and it goes through my mind every so often.
DH does baseball with the kids in the summer and we have co-op once a week for two sessions of eight weeks in the school year and that is about all we do. Sometimes I want to say no to that too but the kids love it and I hate to say no to everything.
Love that you are asking for prayers for this, Sonya, and what an equally wonderful thing that YOU are praying over this topic and planning a seminar. The topic is important. I will keep you in my prayers.
Peace of Christ be with you,
Angie
I’m praying for wisdom for you as you take on this challenge. Thank you for seeing this need and desiring to help us mothers as we teach our children.
I will be praying for you Sonya! To echo these lovely ladies, this topic is especially necessary for CM schoolers. I have learned from experience that we should “spread the feast” but not to the point of gluttoney! More later if I can!
Absolutely praying. We were just talking, at a mom’s night, about how in our society good parenting=doing, doing, doing and how it is just not true. I’ve noticed an even bigger emphasis on it now than when we first started (my eldest is 16.5). People will ask me what my 2 year old *does* and they don’t mean clinking oversized buttons into an empty coffee can or play-dough, they mean activities. While there was still some pressure to do when my older ones were little, it wasn’t the same push.
Thank you for being willing to speak this truth to moms!
Thank you so much, ladies! Your encouraging words and your prayer support are nourishing and refreshing to my soul!
Janell, what a great quote from Lewis! And that brings to my mind the word balance. CM advocated a variety…a liberal education. She talks about spreading the feast of ideas before the student. How would you balance CM’s idea with what Lewis said in that quote? I imagine that question would be one that might come up in the workshop, Sonya….how to balance giving variety but not overload with too much.
Looking at her schedules, it seems like she spread the feast of variety with lots of subjects but she didn’t do every subject every day and she kept the lessons short, requiring full attention. It think the overload happens when we try to cram too much into a day and too much into a lesson.
Very good point…too much into a day and too much into a lesson. I think finding that balance is easier in the younger years. But once you hit high school, it’s easy to feel like the variety has to be lessened because subjects take longer. So you’re spending more time on science, more time on math, etc. And there’s only so many hours in a day. So I think it can be harder to find that balance because you feel the pressure of making sure you are covering all that needs to be covered. Does that make sense?
I will share about our science. This year, we planned to do chemistry. So I began my planning and had narrowed it down to basically two options. One was a more rigorous high school chemistry course or a less rigorous high school course. My daughter has not really cared much for science up until this year. I chose the less rigorous course. Doing so allowed me to add in some additional living books. And you know what? My daughter has told me several times this year that she LOVES chemistry and it’s her favorite subject this year. And do you know what else? It has sparked an interest in her for science. She has gone to the library and checked out more books on chemistry and physics – all on her own. I really believe that had I gone with the more rigorous chemistry course, she would not have liked chemistry and that spark of interest for science may not have happened. I am so glad I chose what I chose. And it made me think, if choosing a less rigorous course means it will increase a love of learning and/or spark interest in that subject, I think I would much rather choose that than. 🙂
When things get off track at our house, I stop everything. Sometimes that’s for a few hours, but it can end up being days/weeks, or longer. It gives us time to regroup and reprioritize. It usually looks something like this:
Bible study with breakfast continues.
Chores continue.
Math continues.
Reading practice/instruction continues.
Writing cotinues.
Family read aloud continues, but may be done later in the evening.
The rest of our studies stop until I can determine what has thrown us off track.
If it’s an outside activity, we reevaluate the importance and determine if it needs to be dropped, or kept with alterations to the schedule.
If it’s bedtime/rise time routines that have gotten off track, we work to get those back under control.
If it’s screen time that’s infringing on work/study time, we delete it altogether until it can be rationed back into the day.
Doing only those things that are absolutely necessary for our family for a time sheds light on the ways in which we can add in more when life allows for it. At times, we don’t do all the extras of CM. We just cannot keep it all going all year. That’s okay. We know our children are exposed to these beautiful extras much more often than most children, so they do have an appreciation for artists, composers, poetry, etc. They enjoy them when we pursue them and look forward to them when we’ve had to leave them off our to-do list for a time. It actually instills a desire for beauty.
Right now, we are in a “getting it back together” time. Bible, chores, 3Rs, and adding each extra back in over the next few weeks. It’s a matter of habit, but it’s also a seasonal situation for our family, too. I’m not sure these words offer any more than a reality check, an “it’s okay if you can’t do it all,” a “just breathe” kind of comment. But, I hope it helps some of you come to terms with reality.
From my own experience, I sometimes think that our own lack of confidence in our chosen method of teaching, makes us keep adding things, whether it be material or exta minutes to try and make it look like what we think it should. We are afraid to trust the method one hundred percent….however as someone who has now finished home schooling, I can say that once I trusted what I was doing…and trusted that over scheduling and over thinking everything was not the way to go, and I let go and relaxed into it ..the girls seemed to do so much better – and they have done really well. They are still avid readers and learners…they are self motivated, and even with the memory issues one of my daughters now has….which makes it hard to study…she is finding, the short lessons and narration skills are helping her tremedously. So my only advice would be trust the method and trust yourself…and though it is hard to see at the time…at the end of the day…the method works beautifully – as mums I think we waste way too much time second guessing ourselves when in reality if we are following the method even if we do it in our own individual way, meaning using different books etc…then we will be successful. Key word would be Relax : ))
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