Learning How to Learn

I wrote this at the end of last school year.  

I was naive, I was hopeful, I was dreaming.  

This is the time of year that I start to get tons of ideas for our homeschool for NEXT year. We have so much to do to finish up, but next year is the number one thing on my brain. I am so excited about how great things can be NEXT year. I do this around spring time every year. Im ready to move on.

Next year, I believe, I hope, I pray, that I will break out of my fears and allow my children and myself to live. Project oriented homeschooling is my goal. Yes they need to be able to read, spell, do math and I even want them to be able to write stories and articles. I even have a plan to cover world history, PA history AND US history. But most of all I want them to explore THEIR interests to the fullest.

I believe we can start this summer. They wont even know that its school when I say, So, what do you want to do today?

Are you excited about NEXT years homeschooling adventures?

How much of this is reality for our homeschool this year?

What I Wanted

All I really meant by this was that we would focus on one project at a time.  Possibly several projects at a time, but the idea was that we would take things in chunks instead of spreading a subject or project out over the full year we would focus a lot of time on one or two subjects or projects and then move on to something else.

I know this sounds very vague.  A radical example might be to do spelling and ONLY spelling for the first few weeks of school and finish a years worth of spelling in a short time.  Then focus on math, then writing, then history, then science.

FOCUS.  I like focus.  I like to see the end and finish something.  I dont really like doing a little bit of each thing every day and dragging it out for 180 days.  That sucks the life out of me.  

I wanted it to be more fun though too.  I wanted fun projects that the kids would truly enjoy.  Not fun school, but fun life. Fun life in projects.

Our Reality

My reality is that even though I would LOVE to bang spelling out really quickly and not do it all year, I have it stuck in my head that this is something that NEEDS to be done daily, all year.

Am I right?  I dont know.  But it is the way things are done.  And there are so many things that NEED to be done daily that so far in our school year we dont have a lot of time to FOCUS on any one thing.

So, no my excited last year self did not get what she really wanted.  But Im still hopeful.

The hope will wear off as the days go by.  Or Ill change it up and make some big changes around here.  Well see.  Well see.

In the meantime we are enjoying the learning process.  Learning how to live.  Learning how to love.  Learning how to learn.