Thinking about next year

I hope to have a few minutes before Wonder Toddler wakes up to craft some thoughts about our homeschooling adventures next year.

Anyone who has known me for several years can vouch for the fact that I have tried many many different "types" of homeschooling.  Here they are in order of frequency of occurrence in any given month:

1. Unschooling/crisis schooling/mama's lazy-depressed-hormonal schooling:   (now please, I don't mean that all unschoolers are NONschooling/non-parenting or lazy. I'm simpling saying how things played out in my own home).   This happens every pregnancy, postpartum, crisis time-of which there have been plenty.  We school...for a few days, then take days/week/weeks off while the kids learn stuff on their own. Or not. We do make up for it by plowing through:

2. Sonlight.  Either as-is or usually tweaked.  A little, or a lot.  Sonlight is hands down my favorite overall curriculum, and someday when my children are grown I'm going to teach *myself* one of their high school cores. :)  But I have to tweak it one way for my oldest (like getting everything on tape and/or reading it to her, supplementing mucho spelling and math practice, etc) and tweak a different way for my 2nd (like adding MORE books, and workbooks for everything we can.)   I just couldn't make it work anymore.

3. Creating my own literature rich lessons for every topic.  In a perfect world, this might work.  But I don't have the creativity or the ability to serve everyone's needs this way.  Next year I'll have 4 students and 4 wildly different needs (more later).

4.  Latin Centered:   Love this too. Especially the simplicity and directness with Important Subjects (or what they deem as so).   Except certain of my children cannot seem to learn a foreign language no matter how they try, and the tears were becoming too much.  I guess I'm too black and white, but I can't seem to do "Latin Centered" and NOT teach latin!  Or do Latin Centered with one kid and sonlight with another and delight directed learning with a third.  I want to be Joyce Swann who just sat her 10  kids down three hours a day every day  and did Calvert until they graduated 6 years early. :-P

5. Seton:  OK, I did this one year officially, and went with workbooks from Seton for my 4th grader in the middle of this year.  It's working well for her.  Bombed for my older, creative, dyslexic in 3rd grade.   I didn't understand all her struggles then, and maybe we could go back to that with many supports for her.  But honestly, I don't know if there is much retention from my 4th grader.  So what is the point??  She's doing work, but is she learning??




Most days/months around here look like a mish mosh of the above.

Soooooo....next year.

Sigh.

Here are my kids:   A rising 7th grader who struggles in spelling, working memory (and other kinds of memory), multi-step math and memorizing facts  -- although she *gets* the "why" behind the things quickly if it is presented well...she just can't get from the hands on demonstration of "why" to the multi-step algorithm for an equation, for example.  Something will get forgotten, and then the problem is wrong. She's a decent artist, tends to learn in big spurts with long gaps in between, and loves to listen to books on tape over and over.  Excellent, natural skills with little children (well, except her own sisters who she thinks are out to get her, lol).  Things that seem to work with her are very teacher/labor intensive:  Michael Clay Thompson's Language Arts,   any kind of math because I have to help so often, Apples and Pears Spelling, me reading aloud - repeatedly. Being she's my oldest and guinea pig, I have no idea how much is too much accomodation for her learning disabilities, nor do I have all day to just cater to her.

A rising 5th grader who would be happiest to cram and forget everything. Loves her workbooks because she doesn't have to think much and just fill in blanks.  Also loves them because she needs a very clear sense of how much work there is to do and when she will be done.  Panics when things are too open ended. Or even sort of open ended.  :-P Loves writing stories reminiscent of American Girl books, which I would say is her "talent" and she can spend hours crafting characters, etc. But when I ask her to write a paragraph or two on her trip to the pool or George Washington (or whatever!) she freaks and has seemingly no idea what to do (depsite the writing curriculum that was taking her step by step).

A book smart rising 2nd grader who has the attention span of a flea (God love her!).  I must sit next to her and point her back to each and every problem/question multiple times because she is watching her sisters or daydreaming.  I think part of the problem is boredom because she IS smart and doesn't see the point in doing double digit addition if she already "knows how".  She won't say it out loud because she is sweet like that, but will say it is quite easy if I ask her. Won't do any work unless I track her down, unlike:

My newest student, a 5yo kindergardener.  SMART as anything, firey, reading chapter books, does workbooks on her own so she can be like her sisters doing school.   I guess I shouldn't worry about her, but I don't want to *forget* about her either.  She has so much potential as far as school goes, I want to walk that fine line between letting her FLY and realizing she is just a 5 year old! But, um, did you see above and my other labor intense and highly emotional kids??  She doesn't *like* working on her own and wants my attention (as she deserves).

Then there is Jeffrey, good ol' Jeffrey who gets into trouble when we are not entertaining watching him.

To add insult to injury, our dining room table is too small for all of us and there is no one place they can all sit and still have books, etc, spread out a little.  I want to remedy that soon, but we were trying to wait until we moved. (grrrrrrrr.....don't get me started)

So that all brings me to the subject of my post.   What do do next year.

I HAVE NO FREAKIN' IDEA.

The End.