I am Heather, age 33, married to Jamie, age 36, for 13 years. We have four kids.
Ani is 11. She’s intense in every way. She doesn’t like to do anything that doesn’t come super easy to her (most things do). She hates to tell people she’s in eighth grade because it always gets a shocked look. She is a voracious reader and loves to write. You can see some of her poems under the penname of Jasmine Moonthief here (they love comments!). She has a love/hate relationship with being the only girl in the family.
Cameron is 10. He’s a wonderful and creative yet stubborn little man living in his own little world. He’d be in fourth or fifth grade this year depending on the state (his birthday falls right in the middle of the cut off dates), but we put him in second grade last year (best decision ever) and he’s almost done with third grade currently. He has dyslexia. Learning doesn’t come to him nearly as easily as it does his older sister, but he is willing to work hard and is making some incredible strides.
Fritz is our sweet little motormouth. He is 5. He spends most of his time playing with his little brother or on the computer, iPod, or Wii, but spends a couple days each day doing school. He’s a pretty mellow kid, and very loving. He’s in first grade (would be in kindergarten if he went to public school). Math is super-easy for him so he gets quite annoyed that reading isn’t quite so easy.
Adrian is our crazy preschooler. He is every bit a 3-year-old. He progressed from tot school to pre-k this year. He spends his time playing with his big siblings, particularly his best friend Fritz, and pretty much doing whatever he wants. He’s very intense like his big sister. He loves to do things for applause, and is his own biggest fan. He talks all the time and, somehow (I’m thinking LeapFrog videos), he knows all the letters by sight and can tell us what sound each makes.
Now a little background on our homeschooling journey. I was homeschooled for a few years. I met Jamie in a college class when I should have been in my first month of my senior year of high school. Thank goodness I had been homeschooled and in college early. I of course planned to homeschool my kids from the time before they were even born. Luckily Jamie’s always been willing to go along with my oddities.
When Ani was almost 4 1/2 she decided it was time to start “doing school.” We went with Calvert School for her kindergarten work. It was fine, though after a couple months Ani learned to read (using their Come Read With Me – now Discoveries in Early Reading – program) and then the work was just plain too easy for her. She raced through the rest of her coursework. (Calvert Kindergarten has since been updated and is much more complete.)
For first grade I decided to put together my own stuff. She raced through that way too easily, too. We tried Alpha Omega LIFEPacs. I had enjoyed it when I was homeschooled. But she had a tendency to go WAY too fast and finish a whole LIFEPac in a day or two. We tried workbooks from Barnes and Noble and BJs. Again, she raced through them way too fast.
Our next step was KONOS unit studies. We did the Africa unit summer 2005. We had a ball. But it wasn’t quite the right fit for Ani. She wasn’t into arts and crafts and really was more of a workbook girl (oddly enough, as she’s gotten older, she’s started liking the arts and crafts hands-on type stuff much more than workbooks, though prefers when it’s a spur of the moment thing rather than a planned-for-school thing). So on we went trying to figure out what to do next, though we have done other unit studies I’ve written and we enjoy them as long as they aren’t the main part of the kids’ education because I get burned out all too easily creating them.
Then I got pregnant with Fritz and between the throwing up and feeling all icky we pretty much did nothing specifically educational. We read a whole lot. We were keeping track of the number of books we read from September 1st through April 30th for a reading club. We read over 1600 books in that time, the majority by the end of January.
Unschooling does not work for Ani. I really like the unschooling way myself, but for Ani school must be obvious learning for her to be happy. By January she was absolutely begging for real school. Luckily I was feeling better being in my second trimester so that was a possibility. Then I read The Well-Trained Mind. It resonated with Jamie and me and we decided to try out classical education with Ani. Oh, boy! It was a perfect match. For her.
And then there is Cameron. He is not much into doing anything that looks like “doing school” or school at home. Unschooling does work for him. Very, very well (to an extent… he’s likely never learn to read, write, or do math – he’d be golden in basic science and social studies). In trying to find what would work for both of the big kids together, we took a look at what worked for each of them and realized that being read to was it. Literature based. So we started using Sonlight. It was the right fit for them both and worked wonderfully for a while. Unfortunately, the kids got burned out by two years of world history and Ani started insisting she hates history all together (painful for me, a history buff, to hear… luckily she is liking it a lot more now that we’ve changed it around). Also, Ani stopped learning so easily from listening to me read. I totally understand that since I have trouble concentrating when I am being read to as well. We eventually discovered that Sonlight also made them both, but particularly Ani, lazy and trained them not to expect to do much of anything really educational in school. I don’t think they learned – or at least retained – much of anything from those three years of Sonlight.
So on to find something else. We decided to go eclectic. We used everything from Teaching Textbooks to Singapore to Apologia to Alpha Omega to Shurley English to the Young Scientist Club Kits to ARTistic Pursuits to lapbooks. However, that really wasn’t working out. I was spending way too much time planning and preparing for school and getting stressed and burned out. And, so, we have come full circle and are back to Calvert.
Doing school with four all at once is a little overwhelming to think about sometimes, especially because two are small and one of the big ones isn’t reading fluently yet. But it’s working out and isn’t overwhelming at all most of the time. We’re really enjoying this exciting homeschooling journey we’re on.
Updated 12/23/11
