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Iron Man is Swimming in My Lemonade Part 3: Homeschooling Lessons – Curriculum!
If you’ve been following my recent posts, you’ll know that I’m sharing some lessons that I’ve learned while I’ve been homeschooling. (Iron Man is Swimming Part 1 and Iron Man is Swimming Part 2) Today’s topic has been one of the biggest learning curves for me and our whole family as we’ve gone through this process. Curriculum. We’ve used several different styles of curriculum during the course of our homeschooling years and with each one, we’ve learned something that we take with us to the next one. The first year we did an ‘online’ curriculum that promised us virtual classrooms with very little need for parental involvement. For this newbie…
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Iron Man Is Swimming in My Lemonade Part 2: More Homeschooling Lessons
Yesterday I started a short series about homeschooling with “Iron Man is Swimming in My Lemonade.” Today I’m talking about a few more lessons learned in my homeschool journey. Calendar: Public schools are required to complete all of their curriculum standards within a 180 day window. That’s about six months give or take holidays and snow days and such. This seems like a lot of time, but really – it’s not. In our lessons, we chose to take some extra time on some subjects and topics. We found that a lot of things were glossed over or missed in fundamentals, so we spent more time there. But the biggest thing we…
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Iron Man is Swimming in My Lemonade or: What Homeschooling Has Taught Me
Recently, while talking to a good friend about homeschooling, she told me that I should write a book about it. I admit that I laughed out loud. I’m definitely not qualified to tell anyone how they should homeschool! The first few days of working with all three kids at home were absolutely insane for me. At one point I wondered if I’d made a huge mistake when, between school lessons and conference calls for my business, my son brought me a huge decorative margarita glass. It was full of lemonade and an Iron Man action figure appeared to be doing the backstroke in it. I thought for sure at that point…
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“I could never homeschool my kids…”
I spent many, many years saying those words to pretty much anyone who would ask. I have always believed that homeschooling was ambitious and fantastic – but not for me. I became a pro at giving homeschooling moms props at the same time I said I never would. And then something strange happened. Our public school experience degraded into some sort of news story you might read on the national news. Little by little, our confidence in our school eroded until we felt we really had few other options. First, let me be very honest here. We loved our public school. We volunteered and we were happy with the teachers…
