Yes, fall is falling so quicky that I’m afraid it will be winter next week!  Our week was full of fall type activity, and some retrospection on my part too.

It’s to easy to get caught up in the academic aspects of home education.  After all, once you have homeschooled for a year or two, you’ve ordered from at least one or two catalogs or curriculum companies, and you are inundated with mail.  Catalogs, flyers, packages of postcards that are nothing more than more advertisements for more curriculum, more programs, more online schools, and even more catalogs.  I know that I went from homeschool novice to curriculum junkie in our first year of homeschooling.  The sad part about it is what we do to ourselves and our kids in that process.  We start meeting families who do school one way, differently than us, and we think WOW, she’s got it all together and that program must be way better than mine.  Changing gears and curriculum to try to find that ever-elusive “perfect curriculum” that will bring about “academic success” for our kids is really a never ending cycle, and it took me MANY years to get out of it.

What is homeschooling, to me?  Home schooling is gathering my kids around me, teaching them God’s Word, and spending quality time together.  We read good literature, we learn valuable math and science skills, we follow (loosely) a scope and sequence for width and breadth of academia, but I don’t stress on that any more.  Time with my kids, making progress as well as they can, is the focus.  We made some adjustments this week which continue us along the path to this end.  We dropped out of the co-op and will use more the weekly schedule that I used with the big kids, when they were little. We did “school” four days a week.  We took one day per week (and I think it was Thursday for a couple of years, and Friday for a few years) to do special projects, field trips. activities, and non-book related activities.  We do “computer school” on that one day per week, which since Thursday was my birthday, was Thursday.  They do their Spelling City activities and QuarterMile Math on Thursday, then we piled in the van and went to the farms, to a pumpkin patch.

Note to Self:  Call ahead to the farms to find out what days they have activities.  They weren’t open, well not really, on Thursday.  It was  a nice drive though, and the boys got to run around in a pumpkin maze.  We went back on Friday, paid $5.50 a head to get very lost in a corn maze and pick out a pumpkin from the field.  There were other things that we were supposed to “get” for buying our wristbands, but couldn’t find the games, and both times we tried to get a train ride it was full. Ah well, it was also FREEZING outside and Momma didn’t think she would need more than a heavy sweater… and she was WRONG.   The boys had their coats on though, thankfully!  All in all we did have a nice afternoon, and we are getting ready to carve pumpkins here in about half an hour. Pray for me, Halloween is not my thing. That’s for another post, though.