Ducks in the Bathtub

Fitting it all in

2011-02-12T13:10:00.001-06:00

Being a home schooling mother with a baby, I can't honestly say I wish the days were longer. I mean, by the time both girls are asleep, I'm ready to be ALONE for a few minutes. Sometimes I do wish I could fit more in during the days, though. I have these great Intellego unit studies on American government and economics I got that I wish we had time for, but we don't right now. I could probably squeeze them in somewhere, but May would likely revolt, no matter how fun they are. She claims to love arts and crafts, but half the time she doesn't even want to do those, as she'd rather just play.

For instance, right now we're working on a diorama for Jack And The Beanstalk. Or at least, we did work on it one time. She was really excited. I was really excited. We talked about how we'd make the beanstalk and put the clouds and giant's house on top of the box. Then she painted the sky and got tired of it. I haven't been able to coax her back to it. I could insist she do it, but really...it's a diorama. How educational is it? It's an idea from Suppose The Wolf Were An Octopus, which we generally enjoy, and I want her to finish it, but I have a feeling that's going to take a few bored evenings when her dad is at school.

I'm hoping that next school year we'll be able to get in more things like those Intellego unit studies. For one thing, she gets better at focusing every day. Improved ability to focus should mean that she can actually work on something for 5 or 10 minutes when I need to see to the baby or whatever. Right now she pretty much forgets what she's doing the second I walk out of the room. Yesterday she was working on math and I went to talk to my husband for about 7 minutes. She was doing something she was good at (adding numbers to 8 in the higher decades) and actually liked (filling in her answers on a grid to make a design) so it wasn't that she didn't want to finish or had trouble doing the work. However, in that 7 minutes, she did 1 problem. She did manage to color in all the circles in all the numbers that had circles, but unfortunately that's not the particular skill we were working on right then, lol. Nevertheless, she is actually improving. A few months ago she wouldn't have finished even one problem. She would've immediately left the table and started playing a game, then had a total meltdown when I asked her to please come back and finish. Staying at the table to do one problem and color a little is progress. Baby steps.

Another thing in our favor is that once she's finally able to write a bit more and read a little better, those things should take up much less time every day, leaving more time for other things. Right now she's writes incredibly slowly and I'm just not comfortable making her do a lot of writing, given how taxing it seems to be for her. She's improving, though, so hopefully that won't be such a hindrance by the time late summer rolls around and we officially call her a second grader. Hopefully we will also be past the point of needing to spend so much time on phonics and reading. As I've mentioned (repeatedly), reading has not come easily to her, so we've spent a LOT more time attempting to master it than I thought we would. Hopefully we'll be over the hump soon, and that will free up some time, too.

Sick days

2011-01-30T20:12:00.000-06:00

The great thing about home schooling is that you can take a day off for illness without ever worrying that you need to call anyone or make up work or bring a note from the doctor. The other cool thing is that, if you're too sick to go to school but not too sick to do some school work, you can still have a school day. :) I'm not sure May really thinks that's cool, but it definitely seems cool to me. We had a very light week this week because I was really sick all week with some horrible cold that turned into a nasty case of sinusitis. We completely took one day off because she also had a minor cold. The other days we kept it simple: reading, some problems from Singapore Challenging Word Problems, spelling, and some math games. I'm still sick, but I'm ready to get back into the normal swing of things tomorrow

Random thoughts

2011-01-22T11:56:00.000-06:00

I have this background and I can't get rid of it! I think I deleted the gadget space that contained the code or something. I don't know, but it's gone. Hmph. I also never remember exactly what it is I wanted to say whenever I get here, which is kind of silly given how much I like talking about homeschooling and how few people I have to do it with.

Right now I'm beginning to wonder if perhaps May is dyslexic. My thoughts about her have run the gamut from absolutely normal to absolutely not normal. Some days I think my expectations may be too high. Others I'm sure they aren't. She's 6-and-a-half now and still having problems with b/d confusion, still writes some letters and numbers in reverse, still occasionally (rarely) mirror writes, and sometimes even reads words backwards. I know this is all normal up until about age 7, but my instinct is telling me it's not normal in her case. My husband doesn't believe she needs to be tested yet - he believes that even if she's still doing it at age 7, that doesn't mean anything because everyone's different. Her birthday is in May. If she's still doing it then, I'm taking her in for testing.

If she is dyslexic that would certainly explain a lot. I expected reading to come so easily for her. She's verbally advanced, has always had a huge vocabulary, is clearly very intelligent, and so on, but learning to read has been so hard for her. So much harder than I anticipated. I learned to read at age 4 and was fluent by age 5 or 6. I was always above grade level for reading, while May is probably right at grade level, but that's with intensive phonics instruction, which I should think should put her above grade level. Perhaps not, though. All I know is that reading is difficult for her and she has some symptoms of dyslexia that don't seem to be getting any better as she gets older. I've probably talked about this already, even though I only have a few posts, because it's on my mind a lot.

Here's something I've been wondering about: Is it normal for kids her age learning a new language to seem unable to hear the proper sounds? She's been exposed to a little bit of Spanish since infancy, so you'd think it wouldn't seem so foreign that she can't even hear it properly, but we've started Discovery Streaming's Elemental Spanish and sometimes I literally have to say a word 15 times before she can repeat it. I'm not talking about rolling her 'r's or anything. I'm just talking about being able to repeat a word like 'recamara' without rolling anything at all. She'll say 'mecamama' or 'mecalama' over and over, like she can't hear me at all. It's the strangest thing, but then again it might be normal for a kid her age. It's just not something I anticipated.

Something else I never anticipated is that I'm considering enrolling her in a virtual charter once we move to California. I've looked at some that are available in the area we'll be moving to, and one of them seems extremely flexible as far as traveling. In fact, on their website they have a page acknowledging that one of the reasons people home school is for the freedom to travel, and it states that they would be happy to help you meet your requirements while traveling during the school year.

The main reason I'm considering a charter is because they have optional classes that meet on Mondays, and I'd love that opportunity for May. She's been way too isolated living out here in the boonies and I'm tired of it. I couldn't tell by looking at the website how often the classes meet, but my sense was that it was maybe 2 or 3 Mondays a month. Another benefit to the charter is that they give you $500/year for curriculum PLUS another $50/month for activities such as art classes, P.E. classes, sports, or whatever. Of course, the language arts curriculum I use wouldn't be covered because it has the maybe 2 or 3 references to Christianity or Christian stories, which contribute absolutely nothing to the curriculum, other than to satisfy the writer and pacify the religious home schoolers, I guess. It's over $200 per level, so it would be nice to have that covered, but oh well.

The main drawback of the virtual charter is that students have to be tested every year starting in first or second grade. Testing doesn't actually bother me the way it bothers some people. My only problem with it is that I'm not teaching the same things the public schools are teaching, so we might not cover something the same year they do, which would hurt her test scores. Over the long run I obviously think she'll outperform the average public school kid, but over the short term I don't know. Additionally, second grade seems too soon to start. This is especially my feeling for May. I think if we decide to go the virtual charter route, we might do it in third grade and continue independently home schooling next year for second. I'll have to feel it out.

Oh, May just woke Spring by screaming about something in the other room. Time to go. :)

Math Breakthrough!

2011-01-12T21:21:00.000-06:00

I've heard people say this sort of thing would happen - that we'd get to a concept that she could not understand, then we'd have to park there for a while until something happened in her brain that made it all click. I believed them, but it just hadn't really happened to us. Not until we got to lesson sixty-something (I'm not going to get the book to look) in Rightstart B. It's the lesson on adding to nines.

She had no problem at all understanding that 9+4=13 or 9+7=16 or whatever. She understood before I even explained it to her. In fact, as I was trying to explain to her she cut me off, sort of rolled her eyes at me, and said that she already knew how to do that. Okay, cool. Then we had to attempt to add to nines in the higher decades, such as 29+4. She could not do that. She absolutely did not understand what I meant. No way that I explained it to her could she understand it. We went over it with the abacus, with base ten blocks, with a 0-99 number chart. It didn't matter. She would tell me "9+7=16" and then I'd say, "Great! So what does 39+7=?" and she'd say something completely off the wall, like, "Ummm, 22?" lol

This was ridiculously frustrating for me, because we've spent months discussing place value and adding 1, 10, and 100 to numbers, so this seemed like it should be easy. And the thing no one tells you about homeschooling is how crazily hard it is to not let your kid see you get frustrated when they don't understand something. After all, it's not their fault they don't get it, so you shouldn't be upset, but we're human and it happens. You have to hide it, though. (Now, being unable to understand something is totally different than not trying to understand something, and that's another thing people don't tell you: you have to be an expert at discerning the difference, but that's a topic for another day.)

So we spent a few weeks doing other things. Every day I would write two of that sort of problem on the board, and every day she'd get them both wrong and we'd carry on with telling time, measuring, etc. Then one day she just GOT it, no problem at all. She did 20 of them like she'd been doing them all along. She didn't even blink. It was just like I've heard: like someone flipped a switch. The weirder thing about it all was that it didn't even occur to her to think about how one day she couldn't grasp it, then the very next day she understood it like she'd been doing it for years.

It was a very exciting day for us, in case you can't tell. :)

What a difference a year makes!

2010-12-18T11:14:00.000-06:00

Wow! It's so hard to believe my last blog post was over a year ago. How things can change and how they have changed! I am no longer the mother to just one girl; now I have TWO beautiful girls. I got pregnant about a month after that last blog post and that certainly changed our whole lives. It was a planned pregnancy that we sort of figured would take a while to actually happen, but I conceived within days of that decision.

I then proceeded to have months and months and months of awful morning sickness. I honestly have no idea how I even managed to gain weight for the first 5 months, given that there were many days I ate nothing but toast and cereal and still threw up 3 times. (There were also days I ate more than that and threw up 5 or 6 times, but I try not to remember those days, lol.) Needless to say, this put a real cramp in all my big plans, mainly because I was not at all prepared for it. My first pregnancy was a breeze - I loved it. This one had me moaning daily about how I would NEVER get pregnant again.

We struggled through most of May's kindergarten year and were rewarded in March with our an 8 pound bundle, born so quickly the midwife made it to our house as I was pushing. Then the awful pregnancy was over, but that newborn period is tiring, my husband was in graduate school, I got mastitis, and the baby was incredibly fussy. The fussiness lasted about 4 months. Now I would consider her to be one of those extreme personalities. She's either extremely happy or extremely upset. She doesn't have much in between, so she's still a difficult baby at times, but of course we love her to death. We'll call her Spring, since she was born on the first day of Spring.

We are now, in December of 2010, halfway through May's first grade year. She has just recently begun reading her first chapter book, called Days Go By. It's a reader from the Pathway Reading program, which is designed for use in Amish schools. Because it's Amish and they believe more in living their faith than proselytizing and lecturing, there isn't anything overtly religious in the book that I have noticed yet, and since the kids live on a farm, of course May loves it. She even asked for more of them, which makes my heart happy. :) We had to get up to page 105 in Phonics Pathways before she was ready for this.

Speaking of phonics, we've ditched Spell to Write and Read and are now using Phonics Road 1 instead. The notebooks used for SWR have lines that are way, way too small for May to write in, and without the notebook, the program is woefully incomplete. Additionally, it felt like drudgery. Phonics Road has songs for memorizing the spelling rules and a notebook that has lines of a size a first grader could actually use. It does have a video component for the teacher, instead of a teacher guide, which I don't really like, but it's not a big deal. Once you're used to the program you can easily fast forward until you see something happening you need to watch, and it's obvious when that is, even in fast forward mode, so it's really only a few minutes per week of video watching. No biggie. May begs to do more spelling every week, so I'd say PR is a success for us.

We are on lesson 61 or so of her math program, Rightstart B, which is slightly over halfway through. However, we're camped out right now because she is having a lot of trouble with the concept of adding to a higher decade number ending in 9. For instance 29+4. She knows that 9+4=13 because we always make a 9 into a 10 when adding, but she has trouble applying the concept when working with multiple tens. I think that's developmentally appropriate, since most math programs don't even cover the concept of crossing over tens until second grade, which I assume is for a reason. She does actually understand it, and can do it, but most of the time she gets too frustrated and quits trying, so we're just doing a few problems every day until I'm sure she really feels confident. When she does, we'll move on in RS. Until then, we are supplementing with worksheets and lessons from other programs, such as the Measuring unit from Math Mammoth and worksheets from Horizons Math 1, which is overtly religious, but that's easily ignored since it's just math. I think we're right where we need to be in math.

For science I purchased R.E.A.L. Science Odyssey (RSO) Life, which is very neatly laid out and mostly open and go, although you really do need to add supplemental books. It has a fantastic book and website list, though, so it's easy to get what you need. However, I then decided I didn't want to cover only one of the sciences, so I'm also using Nebel's Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding (BFSU), which I love. It is decidedly not open and go, though. At least, not in my opinion. I've heard people say they're able to use it right out of the book on the spur of the moment, but it would never work that way for me. I really like it, in spite of that. May seems to like it, too.

We're using Story of the World (SOTW) Ancients for history. I don't love it at all, but it is what it is and May seems to like doing the activities from the activity book, so I can't complain too much. She doesn't seem to be retaining an awful lot, but I keep hearing that the idea at her age is just exposure, so I'm pressing on.

One thing we've enjoyed a lot is the Evan-Moor Beginning Geography reproducibles book. Who knew it would be such a hit? It covers map skills, but not much actual geography - just a basic look at the 7 continents. The plan was to cover geography using the book Children Just Like Me, but we've done MUCH less than I thought we would. After seeing Little Passports mentioned on The Well-Trained Mind forums the other day, I've decided to subscribe. That will at least insure that we cover one country every month, which is much less than my goal of one per week, but it's first grade and one per month is nothing to be ashamed of, especially when public schools aren't even doing that in first grade. Plus, we will likely still cover at least one country on our own every month, so I think we're fine.

Of course, that isn't everything we've done over the last year, but it's probably more than I needed to share. Not that anyone is reading. But at least it lets me discuss my interest in all things related to home education without boring everyone around me. :)

Oh yes, and the ducks no longer live here. Unfortunately, they could not be kept off the covered back patio; every attempt I made failed miserably. That wouldn't matter much if ducks weren't little pooping machines. Blech! It was a minefield on the patio. We found them all good homes with ponds and other ducks, so perhaps I should rename the blog, but I haven't thought of a new title yet.

2009-05-20T23:45:00.000-05:00

Whew! The last few days have been BUSY! Over the weekend my husband, K, and his grandfather built a 10x10 shed with a little covered overhang for the lawnmower. K has been working on finishing the trim and door since then. Fortunately, he took this week off in anticipation of having much to do. Unfortunately, he was right and we haven't had much fun family time during his time off. We did do the zoo again Tuesday, which is better than nothing, but ten days off work and nothing but one afternoon at the zoo to show for it does not make an impressive family staycation, lol. I can't really complain, because the shed does have to be finished. There are just never enough hours in a day.

May noticed we hadn't done any workboxes for several days and was excited to see them filled again this morning. One thing I would never have thought about much if I hadn't seen others mention it is how wonderfully homeschooling just fits into your life. You don't have to plan things for when school is out, your kids don't have to miss visits from their great-grandparents because they have to go to school while they're in town, you can hit all the attractions when they aren't crowded and you can take a vacation when it's appropriate, versus when it fits into the school schedule. When we have family come visit, K often takes a day or two off work. If May had been in school, she would've missed some of her great-grandparents' visit, which would've sucked. I mean, she's too young for school right now anyway, but this fall she won't be. I'm really grateful to have the opportunity to do this. I know a lot of people simply can't, because they have to work. I'm so glad I can do it.

She's five!

2009-05-14T00:00:00.001-05:00

Today was May's fifth birthday and she read her first book all the way through today. It was a very exciting day. The book was one of the Nora Gaydos level one books and she was really proud of herself when she finished, as was I, of course. We made cherry cupcakes and hung out with the ducks for a while. We also met a friend at the park for a playdate, which was nice to do on a birthday.

May decided she wanted sushi for her birthday dinner, so after our playdate was over we did that as a family, then went to Toys'R'Us to spend the gift certificates she got for her birthday from my dad and my grandparents. She used about half of what she had to purchase a Barbie with a mother dog and puppy. Then we came home and she opened her gifts from us: 5 books (which didn't really count, because I was going to buy them anyway), a Webkinz dinosaur, a mosaic tiles magnetic board and a small (very small) dinosaur dig kit. The mosaic tiles board seems to be a big hit, which makes me really excited. I love it when my kid is doing anything creative and I searched like crazy to find her a gift she'd like that wouldn't be one more darn toy she'll play with for a couple of weeks and then forget about. She's very into drawing and making things, so I think this one will be something she'll use for a while.

Rainforest Week Has Been Rained Out

2009-05-11T22:06:00.000-05:00

How appropriate, lol. This week our theme is the rainforest and we were incredibly excited about tomorrow's planned trip to the zoo for free Tuesday. However, the weather is not cooperating, as it plans on providing us with showers tomorrow morning and thunderstorms tomorrow afternoon. It is fitting, of course, that it would rain all week this week, but really, I just want to take my kid to the zoo to look for rainforest animals. Sigh. I would plan it for another day this week, but then it would cost us $20 and when you're on a (TIGHT) budget, you don't spend that kind of money to go somewhere that would be free if you just went on the right day. Perhaps rainforest week's field trip will have to be next week. Maybe I'll make next week's theme the arctic and then the field trip will still be appropriate. lol

In other news, I picked up a copy of Good Apple's Pathways of America: The Santa Fe Trail at a resale shop for fifty cents on Saturday. It's for grades 4-8, but I'm thinking we'll be able to do it in probably 2nd or 3rd. Either way, it's really neat. It has recipes, biographies, maps, crafts, science experiments. It's very cool, especially for fifty cents.

May is doing really well in her spelling, not as well in her reading. She can sound out all the parts of simple words, but she has sooooo much trouble blending. She can tell me how to spell 'good' or 'tan' or whatever, but she can't read them. We got her the level 2 BOB Books (because the store was out of level 1 the day we were there) but she wasn't interested. Then I found one of the level 1 Nora Gaydos books at a used book store for some ridiculously low price (I don't even know how low - only that I got that plus 6 other books for $13!) and we tried one of those. We got to "The tan fat cat ran," before she was tired of it. She's just not interested in reading right now. I can't even understand, because I was reading by her age and I have always loved reading. I get why she's not reading yet, since she's still really young. What I don't get is why she really just doesn't care. Oh well, sooner or later she will, I guess.

Today her first workbox was the SWR phonogram cards and the learning log, which I filled out myself as she dictated the words, since she hates writing and I'm more interested in her knowing how to spell than in doing the writing at her age. The reason for that is that I am definitely not one of those people who believes lack of spelling ability is hunkey dorey as long as you have spell checker and because I believe being a good speller facilitates good reading. And having said all that, I will inevitably spell something wrong in this post, and since I never, ever, ever use spell checker, I won't catch it. lol Anyway, she groans about the phonogram cards when she sees them, but I'm not sure why, because once we start them she likes it and she gets really upset if I tell her a sound before she figures it out on her own. I thought today might turn out grumpy, because she didn't want to do the learning log, but she got through the ten spelling words in just about five minutes and the rest of the day was great.

Three of the other 5 boxes were related to the rainforest theme, one of which was to make a rainforest collage. That turned into a three hour project, which she had sooo much fun doing. She had a lot more fun with it than I expected her to and definitely spent more time on it than expected. All through it, she was going on and on about how she had the best school work ever and how glad she was to get to homeschool. I was very happy. lol

2009-05-06T22:38:00.000-05:00

We've been doing the workbox thing for a couple of weeks now and I really like it. However, I am glad I tried it out before committing to doing it the way the "official" workbox system is supposed to be done. According to the woman who adapted this idea for homeschooling, your kid should do 12 boxes each day and some of those boxes should be filled with fun, age appropriate things, like Play-doh, board games or whatever. What I'm leaning toward right now is keeping it at no more than 6 or 9. The reason is that I don't want to schedule my kid's whole day. If I wanted to do that, I'd send her to school.

To finish up twelve boxes would probably take a full 6 hours, if we didn't take any breaks. It's great if some of them are fun stuff, but I don't really want to tell her what to do with all her free time! I don't want to essentially say, "Hey, here are 30 minutes of 'free' time, but you can only do what I tell you with them." Playing Candyland because someone said you had to isn't nearly as fun as playing it because you wanted to. I still like the idea of having some boxes for fun stuff, because that does give her something to look forward to, but I don't see the need for having 12 boxes so I can put in 4 or 5 "just for fun" activities. Let's have 2 or 3 of those and then get finished up by lunch! lol

May does seem to like the workbox system. She really gets a big kick out of pulling the laminated number off each box and putting it back on the grid as she completes a box. I think it makes her feel like a "big kid" to have something to accomplish. :) She was really excite to tell her daddy all about it when he got home the first day, and she likes to look at the boxes first thing in the mornings to see what's in them.

I did create a simple spreadsheet for tracking what we do for each subject throughout a week. I put plans into it a couple days in advance, but I don't feel compelled to stick to them. I just change it in the evening to reflect what we actually did do, when we didn't follow the plan. Each week has a theme, which can be anything from rain forests to appreciating differences. I find stories, movies, shows, worksheets and anything else I can to go with the theme. It keeps it fun for us. May likes the whole concept of a theme, so that helps.

I'm currently trying to decide if it would be interesting for her to have ducks as our theme one week. We have a tiny flock of five 4-week-old ducklings in the back yard (hence the name of the blog - we had ducklings in the bathtub not that long ago) and she really enjoys them. Ducks don't seem like an exciting topic to me, I guess, but I think May would totally dig it. Don't get me wrong - I love having the little things. Researching ducks at a kindergarten level just doesn't seem very interesting. lol I'll run it by May tomorrow and I bet she'll think otherwise.

Pre-K Today

2009-04-23T22:59:00.000-05:00

Four months was too long to wait. I decided that today was as good a day as any to begin the transition from absolutely no schedule at all to something slightly resembling a schedule. I decided to sell it to May as "pre-kindergarten" and she was cool with it. Of course, immediately after getting it all planned out last night, I remembered that today was story hour at the library, so I had to make some changes to accommodate that. It did go well, though.

It isn't that we had absolute chaos around here because we had no schedule; our days had a nice rhythm to them. I just didn't see where we'd fit in much in the way of academics without instituting a system of some sort. The one I decided to try (the only one I've seen, actually) is the workbox idea that is apparently some new, big deal in the online homeschooling community right now. I wouldn't know it's new if everyone wasn't saying so, given that I've only been looking at this stuff for the past few months, but it seems to be a big craze. I don't know anything about all that, nor did I spend the money to purchase the ebook explaining how it's supposed to be done. It just looked like something that would help me set some daily goals and make sure they were accomplished.

The idea is actually borrowed from a program (or multiple programs) for autistic children and it's pretty straightforward: You set up boxes with numbers on them. Your kid works through the boxes in order. When they've finished all the boxes, they're done for the day. It helps if the kid can see what's in the boxes, because the idea is that in some of the boxes you put fun activities, so knowing that when they finish box 3, they get to go play outside (or whatever) for box 4 provides some extra motivation. The recommendation is twelve boxes. That was way too many for us for now, so we went with six and our day was very, very full, although a lot of that had to do with things unrelated to what was in the boxes.

So what was in the boxes? Well, box #1 had the library card in it, since that's where we had to be at 10 a.m. Box #2 had a coloring page to go along with the Aesop's fable "The Dog and His Reflection", which I read to her while she colored. Box #3 had 2 math worksheets. Box #4 was a lapbook on the 5 senses, which we finally completed (we started a couple weeks ago and got sidetracked). Box #5 had a set of phonogram flashcards from Spell to Write and Read. The last box was about the cardinal directions, with a little "Play Outside" card I made, so we located the directions in our yard, talked about them and then played out there.

Tomorrow's boxes are loaded up in this order:

SWR phonogram cards with a Draw and Write Journal

Math worksheet

"Play Outside" card with magnifying glass for looking at bugs

The book What Your Kindergartner Needs to Know, for talk about maps

Five senses mini-books, because we still need to complete the one on taste

"Computer Time" card I made, so she can play at something educational or just fun

Tomorrow should be much less busy, since we don't have the library trip with the obligatory post-story hour playground trip. Plus, tomorrow I hopefully will not have the dreadful headache I've had all afternoon today.

Hmm...I typed all of that a couple weeks ago, but accidentally saved it instead of publishing it. :)

2009-04-20T22:09:00.000-05:00

Since there aren't enough homeschooling blogs out there already (/facetiousness) , I thought I'd start my own to keep track of how this all works out....also because I'm incredibly excited about homeschooling and no one I know actually cares, lol. I have only one friend who's going to be homeschooling, but she's a very relaxed personality and excitement over lesson plans probably isn't in her repertoire. Therefore, in order to spare my poor father the torture of flipping through another curriculum, while I give him a detailed run down of how it's supposed to work, just because I want to talk about it, I decided a blog was in order.

I guess then, a description of myself, my child and our situation is in order. I'm a 30-year-old mother to one girl, who will be 5 next month. We will unofficially officially (that's not a typo - I'll explain in a sec) begin homeschooling in August, which is 4 months from now. That means that I will not be registering her with a school or the state because the law requires me to register her at age 6, but we will begin formal studies anyway - well, if you can call anything that happens in kindergarten "formal studies". That means that when we do officially register her, she'll be in her second year of homeschooling.

My husband is in the military and I am a SAHM, but I'm currently in nursing school. I went to college long ago, right after high school, but I dropped out in my fourth year for multiple reasons. I then attended massage school and loved it. However, I chose not to work after the birth of our daughter. Now that she's older, I'm quite tired of the way it makes me feel when I don't work an outside job at all, so I will work nights two or three days a week when I complete nursing school. I'm really excited about this. It's a portable job, which is great when you're married to someone in the military, and it will allow us to continue raising our daughter the way we think is best for our family.

Our daughter, whom I will refer to as "May" since that will be easy for me to remember, is adorable and hilarious. She loves anything to do with animals, including those of the extinct variety, particularly dinosaurs. She wants to live on a farm or, even better in her opinion, remain in this house, but purchase livestock for the back yard. She is a veritable treasure trove of information on things she's taken an interest in, but she's not reading or anything like that yet, nor does she seem interested in doing so, lol.

There are a few reasons we've chosen to homeschool, but religion is NOT one of them. We do not belong to any organized religion. What our decision to homeschool all boils down to is that we simply believe we can do a better job than the schools can. Since homeschooling is an option for us, we've decided to be thankful for that and take advantage of the opportunity to do it, which we realize many people don't have. We don't fear what May would pick up from the kids at school, we don't want to prevent her learning about evolution, we don't think public school is the worst thing that could happen to a kid and we don't want to shelter her from the world. We just want to do provide her the best education we can and this is how we think we can do it. :)