This morning began as many of my mornings do towards the end of one school year with me searching for information about home school curriculum. It seems that each year we try a curriculum and while we learn we aren't really happy. I have grown tired of everyday of this homeschooling journey being filled with aggravation, irritation and frustration. Can my children really be learning to their full potential and can I really be teaching to mine if we feel this way? The answer is most definitely, NO!
As I was searching the Internet for the "new and improved" curriculum for us to use next year I ran across an answer one mom had for her homeschooling method and she simply said their homeschooling philosophy was "Don't worry, be happy". ( Here is the link to the blog I read. http://blog.bravewriter.com/2006/09/06/rastafarian-homeschooling/ ) Those four words struck me very profoundly! I want that for my homeschooling experience.
This gave me an idea... for one week we will us a totally different approach to homeschooling. We will learn about whatever my kiddos want to learn about, anything that grabs there interest. My 11 year old immediately asked if we could learn how to moonwalk and my 4 year old wants to learn about dolphins. We will read books together, and watch interesting shows, for example today we will start reading Alice in Wonderland and we will be watching How the States got Their Shapes, America the Story of Us, and World's Deadliest Pack Hunters. We will still work on math with my oldest and sight words with my youngest, but for the most part we are putting the schoolbooks away and focusing on what interests them (and me). Will it work? Who knows! We might find that this style of learning is too unstructured for us, but I have a feeling we are really going to love learning like this. If we love it this might be our approach for the next school year, if not well I have plenty of time to keep up the researching.
