Tag: school year

Not How It Was Supposed To Go

~ wattlesandcombsfarm ~ Leave a comment

Our first broken bone

Every year I have high hopes for how the school year will start. This year was no different, but of course, things didn’t exactly go to plan. On the Wednesday before school started, we met our homeschool friends at the park for a hang-out day. Everything was going great, the kids were playing, I was talking to my mom friends, and then my son came running up to me holding his arm. He had been on one of those climbing nets and tried to jump down. Unfortunately, his foot caught when he jumped and he fell face-first to the ground and caught himself with his hands. He was in a lot of pain and couldn’t rotate his arm, so we loaded up in the car and headed to the closest Urgent Care. His x-ray confirmed what I already knew, his arm was broken. He had a buckle fracture to be more specific. This was the first broken bone for either of our kids. Luckily he only has to wear a wrist brace and his pain was handled very well with Tylenol and Advil for the first couple of days. Overall he did really well. As soon as he had that hard wrist brace on and his arm was supported the pain was easier to handle. He was able to sleep the first night, which was a concern, and with a little caution, he was able to go back to doing almost everything he normally does. I think he was pretty bummed that it didn’t get him out of school but by the time Monday rolled around he was pretty much back to normal.

Mom’s sick

Our first week of school went pretty well, even though we did end up having a few commitments in the middle of the day. I was pretty pleased with how the kids handled the start of school even though everyone else is still on summer break. It didn’t really change much about their schedule other than going to bed earlier. Our school days, especially the first couple of weeks, are not very long. All things considered the first week was a success. The second week of school is where we went off track again. I woke up Wednesday with a sore throat and went downhill from there. Luckily we take Fridays off now, so Wednesday and Thursday were the only days affected. However, on those two days, they did very little because it hurt to talk. I had a goal this year to make sure we did our read aloud every day, but my throat hurt too bad to get it done this week. Our other subjects like history and science, where I read to the kids, also got put on hold this week. I may have been the only one upset about that! It’s Saturday now and I still feel terrible but I am hopeful it will be better by Monday. This upcoming week will be week #3 and ideally will be more of what our full school day actually looks like. I would really like to be 100% for that. School days are much smoother when mom is healthy.

Life Happens

Sometimes I get really frustrated with the interruptions to our school day and year, but life happens in the middle of homeschooling. As a homeschool mom, I don’t have a substitute I can pull in when I’m sick, or a building to send my kids to so I have the day to get things done. Homeschooling happens right alongside life. Sometimes that’s hard, but mostly it’s wonderful. I never want to forget that what I get to do is a privilege. Not everyone wants to homeschool, but there are some who want to and can’t. We work hard to make this a reality, but I still want to remember I am very lucky to be able to do this. That doesn’t mean homeschooling is always easy. Things sometimes don’t go smoothly or the way we wanted them to and that’s ok. Life doesn’t always go the way we want it to so why would anything else. Despite all this, I am so very happy to have another year to watch my kids grow and learn. Homeschooling allows me to do life right beside them and I wouldn’t change anything about that.

Decisions Have Been Made!

~ wattlesandcombsfarm ~ Leave a comment

It’s decision time in our home. I have been putting off a few decisions lately because I was not ready to get back to school. However, the motivation has finally kicked in and I have figured a few things out. First, we will be trying out a four-day school week this year. This is what I wanted to try, but I also asked my kids which option they wanted, and they both agreed the four-day week sounded good. Instead of having weeks off during the school year, we will have every Friday off. We will still take about a week and a half off during Christmas time but that’s about it. Because we have decided on this schedule we will have to start school sooner rather than later. My plan is to school for 45 weeks instead of 36 so that we get all our days in. That means we will be starting school on July 17th and schooling until late May. I do plan to keep track of our days so that if we do something like a field trip on a Friday we can possibly knock off a few days towards the end of the year. Once May hits I want to be done with school. Something about the sun finally coming out after a long winter makes all of us lose our minds and all we want to do is be outside. I am really hoping this schedule works for us this year. I like the idea of it, because this will give me Fridays to grocery shop, put the house back together, and do whatever other tasks get overlooked during the school week. I am sure there are moms out there who can keep it all together during the school week, but I am not one of them. Having Fridays off will give me the chance to get everything back under control.

Final Curriculum Choices

Since the start of the school year is so close now, final decisions also had to be made for curriculum. I knew from the beginning that we had a couple of things from last year that needed to change. For example our Math curriculum. We have used Math-U-See every year except one. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this program, and I love the idea behind it, but it wasn’t working for us anymore. The biggest problem is that my 10-year-old and I can’t do math together. At least not fully. She either wasn’t understanding how I was teaching it or she was being plain stubborn and refusing to even try. Math is the one subject that could derail our entire day. I did not want our homeschool year to be made hard again because of one subject. To help this I started looking for online math programs. My hope is that if someone else is explaining the concepts to her she will listen and understand a little better. I looked at a ton of options before we made a decision. I have never used this program before but I am hopeful that it will be what we need. We are going to be trying CTC Math for this school year. https://www.ctcmath.com/how-it-works/home-school. My husband and I both liked the sample video that was posted and the way the concept was explained. I am also hopeful that this will be good for my 12-year-old as he starts getting into higher math that I can’t help with as much. I was not great at Math in school and we have always known at some point there would need to be a switch to a tutor or some kind of online math program. Outside of math our days go pretty well, so I am hoping this will help our days run as smoothly as possible

The other big change is our Science curriculum. I have talked about this a few times and the fact that we haven’t found a good curriculum yet. We have tried a few different options but I have never been pleased with any of them. I had every intention of going with Noeo Science or Elemental Science this year but changed my mind last minute. I read a bunch of reviews and neither program sounded all that great. I ended up deciding to try out Berean Builders this year. We will be using Science in the Age of Reason https://bereanbuilders.com/ecomm/product-category/elementary/science-in-the-age-of-reason/. While looking for a science curriculum I stumbled upon this awesome resource and we went ahead and ordered the books and experiment supplies from Home Science Tools https://www.homesciencetools.com/. This is a website where you can order experiment kits that go with a few different curriculums, but you can also order difficult-to-find experiment supplies and even dissection kits. It’s a pretty cool resource if you have experiment-loving kids.

As for the rest of our curriculum, most of that is staying the same as it always has. For Language Arts, we will continue to use mostly IEW https://iew.com/. We use their writing program, Fix-it-Grammar, and handwriting. Spelling and Vocabulary are covered by Spelling Power https://www.rainbowresource.com/product/002784/Spelling-Power-5th-Edition-Adams-Gordons.html?, and Wordly Wise https://www.rainbowresource.com/hSearch.jhtm?keyword=Wordly+Wise#keyword=Wordly%20Wise&mpp=24. Then I add in reading and read-alouds to round out Language Arts. For History, we will continue to use Story of the World. https://welltrainedmind.com/c/series/the-story-of-the-world/. This year we will be using the fourth book in the series and adding in other resources as needed. I have a ton of encyclopedias laying around as well as Who Was Books that are always a good add-in. That pretty much covers everything. The only thing I am still deciding on is an Art Curriculum. My daughter loves art so I am still looking for something for her to do. I think I will probably end up using Artistic Pursuits https://artisticpursuits.com/home.

Homeschool Planner

I have also decided to change our homeschool planner. I know I said I wasn’t going to do this because I loved the online one from Well Planned Gal, but I think it might be a little overkill. I am still struggling with this decision but I think I will skip it this year. I can always go back in and re-subscribe if needed. My thought process behind that is that the online planner is great to print out for records, but I don’t really have to keep those. My state does not require it and sometimes I think I am making more work for myself. I like having the records, but no one is ever going to look at them, so do I really need to put in the effort? I did go ahead and custom-create a printed one, also from Well Planned Gal, and then I am working on creating my own. I don’t typically like planners with a ton of extras, so making my own basic one might be a better option. https://wellplannedgal.com/. I do have a bunch of printables available in my teachers pay teachers shop if you have any interest in looking at those https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Phk-Learning, including some planner pages. This year I am trying to make things as easy as possible. There is no need to overcomplicate and make my year harder for no reason.

Final Thoughts

I have never really had a motto for the year before but this year I found one that I am hoping my daughter can use.

Attitude over Aptitude will determine your Altitude

We had quite a few struggles last year with our attitude. I really want to work with her this time to understand that a good attitude will get you further than almost anything. It will also make the school day go by faster. I am hopeful that the changes we have made will make this year run smoother and that our Friday breaks will give us something to work towards. Ready or not, school starts in about a week and a half.

What a Week

~ wattlesandcombsfarm ~ Leave a comment

This last week wiped us all out. As I sit here typing this post my 11-year-old, who never takes a rest, is laying down for a nap. Like many people around the country, we got a lot of bad weather last week. For us, it was snow and about four days of constant wind. We have 5ft. tall snow drifts in our backyard and our poor neighbor had her entire garage and front door blocked off. For most of the week, it wasn’t safe to leave our house. The wind caused whiteout conditions and the roads around us shut down due to safety. Because we homeschool this shouldn’t have been a big deal but on top of the bad weather, we also had the crud making the rounds in our house. Tuesday morning my oldest woke up and didn’t feel well and then was down and out for the next 2.5 days. I don’t actually know if he had the flu or just a simple bug, either way, he did not feel well. Of course, as soon as he got over it my youngest came down with the same thing. She always gets it a bit worse and had a high fever for an entire day before it broke. I was hoping to get a good week of school done this week to make up for the last one, but it looks like we are going to need at least another day of rest. Mostly because no one has slept well in days. (I just took a break to go check on my son and turns out he has a fever again. So I guess here we go with round #2.) All of that to say we are once again off schedule for schooling. It’s beginning to look like we may end up needing to take the entire month of December off since Christmas will be here before we know it. Later today I am going to sit down with a yearly calendar and take another look at our homeschool schedule. At the beginning of the year I had planned for us to use a six-week on and one-week off schedule. This means there was plenty of time off worked into the year. We even started a few weeks early to help this schedule work. So, although we are off schedule we are not in any trouble for the school year. This is once again one of the benefits of homeschooling. A typical school year is 180 days of school but I get to decide how and when we use them. We can start early or go year round if we want to as long as we get our days in. It’s nice not having to rush through sick days or push too hard. Even though I don’t want to take this time off, and I feel a little stressed about having too much time off at once, it isn’t a big deal. I am going to use the rest of our sick time, however long that may be, to take care of the kiddos, our home, and rest. At least the weather is better than last week.