Schooling today

I filed my private school affidavit the other day.  This is the legal way to homeschool outside the charter system in California.  Every independent homeschool files an affidavit as a private school between October 1 and 15.  Mine is filed. I am legal—not accredited, not ‘approved,’ as California is hasty to point out at the bottom of the form.  Just legal.

I printed out my papers, and filed them with the others, and thumbed through them all.  My first affidavit was filed in the fall of 2005.  I have six years of documents marking my ‘legal’ history of homeschooling.  I actually started nine years ago when my son was two years old. 

I look back and enjoy the memories of crafts, plays, foods, stories and messes we’ve shared.  I also cringe with shame over the stress I infused in our lives over arbitrary standards and deadlines I installed.  We live and learn, I guess…

Today my kids are trained to say they are in sixth and fourth grades.  That isn’t what their math books say, or their science, or their history, or their language arts…I can’t think of anything we use that says they are in sixth or fourth grade.  But that is the beauty, right?

This year we are doing most lessons together—Bible, History, Geography, Science, Music, Drawing, Spanish…  It is nice to streamline the day and to reinforce the lesson when each has to explain what they’ve learned in their own words.

I told in my last post that my daughter’s learning style is more visual and kinesthetic, while my son is highly auditory.  This year we are tailoring to both with lots of reading out loud coupled with themed days that include dressing up, traditional meals, and crafts.  This is the first year I have built into our lessons time to have frequent ‘theme days.’  These days will serve to wrap up the region we studied. We are beginning with the Pacific Islands and will have a luau, with a volcano eruption at some point in the evening.

How has your school evolved through the years?  Would you have done your first years differently if you knew then what you know now?  Do you miss anything about the early years of schooling?