3 Months and Counting - Homeschool Adventures

So, we are three months into this new adventure called homeschooling. There is no way when you begin something like this to know exactly what to do and exactly what you need. Homeschooling itself is not a difficult task. It's really not. Most kids are sponges. They WANT to learn. The key is finding out what motivates them to learn and in what style they learn. We began the adventure with pouring over every homeschool resource online and in-print that I could find. I studied catalogs and obsessed over curriculums. In the end, we purchased a few things from hither and yon and a subscription to a couple of websites that allow me to download what I need each day. We take a weekly trek to the library to check out books to support our lessons and we set out to...well...reinvent the wheel.

I didn't want to reinvent the wheel. It was NOT my purpose. But, I was hesitant to make a large curriculum purchase up front without knowing what we needed. Ha! What we needed, what I needed, was someone to tell me what to do each day. Not entirely. But, mostly. Last week, after admitting to myself and to my husband that I needed more guidance, we purchased the majority of the Memoria Press curriculum for both children. We already had a couple of literature items for our 7th grader and he and I both really enjoy working with it.

What came next was more pouring over the website, the catalog and forums and making final decisions. I pieced together the curriculum from the Memoria Press site, Rainbow Resources and Amazon and voila - a new curriculum that will carry us through the year.   If you are not familiar with Memoria Press, it is a Classical Christian curriculum with the emphasis on Classical.

So we placed the order and the books have been arriving for a few days.  Yesterday we began our new curriculum and our day went better than it has all semester.  We had already been reading such books as Beatrix Potter's treasury, but Memoria's study guides have helped us bring these things all together.  Today we have our weekly co-op and I'm a little sad that we'll be gone the entire day and not get to our new books.  But, tomorrow is another day and we can do spelling and math and literature and composition and so much more!

“Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.” - Beatrix Potter