simplifying school

   So, what about school?  Isn't it hard enough to juggle a kindergartener, a preschooler, and a one year old, and school work when you are in a normal house?  How will you ever get everything done when you are fighting for space, and add in a working husband who needs quiet (heh), and a prissy cat.... what are you thinking?

    Well, evidently, you haven't met me.  I like to do things the hard way.

 I spent today simplifying our school.  I am used to assessing various parts of my life, and taking complication out wherever I find it.  That probably means something different to me than someone else, because we all have different areas of our lives that make us sigh a happy sigh of relief.  For some people, that's their 2 hours of quiet time in the afternoon.  Others value their early mornings.  Some people love both.  I happen to love reading to my kids.  And challenging myself.  School happens to be where those two things collide most often, so I just love our school sessions, and happily so far Sara does, too.  You know, more or less.  Just don't ask her on a day that we did "Fifty Famous Stories Retold".

however, being limited on space and resources, I do have to cut our school back a tad.  So for the sake of contrast... right now, we have a stack of reading to do every week- that covers literature, history, Bible, poetry, Shakespeare, folk tales/ fairy tales, nature study/ science, phonics/ reading, geography, and the non-book subjects; math, copy work, nature study, artist and music appreciation, foreign language.

It looks like a lot, but we don't do every subject every day, or even every week.  School still is an hour a day, give or take.

However, some of those subjects won't hit the road with us.  I had a hard time deciding what, exactly, to do.  Some subjects I'd have dropped this year anyway, for various reasons- artist study, copy work  foreign language.  All those book subjects are a piece of cake.  All the non book ones are harder to remember and work in.  Music gets done naturally in the car, and I generally supplement the curriculum.  Math is first thing, just so that I don't forget about it.  Nature study happens naturally for us, too, but this year I wanted to be more intentional about studying one thing- trees, or insects... not gonna happen, unless we use Paddle To The Sea as a springboard to talk about water.  Which might happen.

I have thought about putting all those books on the kindle and just taking that, instead of a crate of books.  I could- they're all free books.  But... the pictures, the feel of a real book, the natural action of putting a book down and asking "so, tell me what you heard..."  I just can't do it.

Sometimes, I like to do things the hard way- the old fashioned way.

okay, all the time.

I think I will slim the reading list down when the weather gets nicer.  I was planning to take at least 18 months to get through this one school year, and so far we are on pace to get it done in 9 months.  We just love the books that much.  so I have lots of room to slow down.

The simplifying part is really that i'm not going to do a bunch of add-ins.  This sounds terribly boring, but we don't really need all the crafts and worksheets and activities... we'll just read the books, enjoy them, talk about them.  Idealistic?  Maybe.  But it's worked so far... I need to go back to the philosophy of "if it ain't  broke, don't fix it".

So, I'm going to simply... keep doing what works, until it doesn't.  Right?  Of course right.