Great Moments in Homeschooling

Many times I wonder why I homeschool.
The days are sometimes a terrible blend of my disorganization and my kids focus challenges. I have never been a time oriented person as Ski stated in one of those posts below. This is in part for a very good reason. I have a nickel allergy. I have tried tons of watches and none of them have worked for me. I even have issues with the clasp parts if not the back of the face. So for a great part of my life I have lived without a watch. I recently got a very cool watch that hangs on a silk cord around my neck. Yeah!!! Finally something that doesn't bother me. If only I could remember to wear it more often and maybe look at it once in awhile. The other reason for my lack of time/calendar orientation I think is just my personality. I have a loose schedule that I live by. I think it works well for me since 6 kids include a great number of disruptions. BTW, one reason that I dislike the newborn period so much is the need for reliance on a time piece. It becomes very stressful for me.

So, we often have days that go by where I feel nothing got done. And days that go by where I get caught up in something and the time passes us by. And in the day to day grind I have a difficult time seeing what kind of end product is coming out. So, we just go on trusting that something good is coming out. So, the purpose of my post today is to share a little insight into what that product is......

This will not include the fact that I said with great enthusiasm "Hey kids look at the Durer!!!" in the middle of Biltmore to which I only got glazed looks. I will give them credit for realizing who Durer was after I mentioned "The Hare." It will also not include the stunned look my 10yo gives me when I tell him that he needs to rewrite the words because he misspelled them. Hey, how can you spell a word wrong when you picked it from a list on the page?!?!

Our first moment began with a comment close to the beginning of the school year. We were studying Lenin and the Bolsheviks and the end of the Russian Empire. It was not a pretty time in Russian history and it had a great bit of violence. The perspective was bleak and hey, what kid would like studying about an entire family getting shot to death. At one point, my son, discouraged by reading all of this sad stuff, came to me and asked the question that every homeschool mother dreads..... "Why do we have to study this?" I sighed and mumbled something about history being all intertwined with our present and how we should learn from it, but I know I did not present a well thought out or impressive argument. He lumbered away and went back to his reading unconvinced.

After a few more months of plodding through World War I and the intervening time and the beginning of World War II and the rise of Hitler, we came to the week that I feared. The Holocaust. Now, if my kid was bucking me while studying the Bolsheviks, then what was he going to do now? I was a bit wary because I knew what I had planned for our study and I knew it would not be light and fluffy material. I wondered if I would be causing my kids emotional harm to study some of the things we were going to study. But the four of us dove in head first. The material included stories about children in the Holocaust. At the end of the very first day, my ds came to me and said with deep and heavy seriousness of heart, "I know why we need to study this, mom. We need to learn all we can about why this happened and how so that things like this will never happen again!" Wow!! That was cool!! My ds walked through the 2wks+ that we spent on the topic with tears and conviction. He was moved and disturbed by the films and books we saw, but seeing why this era should never be forgotten. One Sat during this time, the kids told me that they heard about a news story about how schools were thinking about not teaching this material. My children were outraged!! They learned and I learned. We sat through films and books crying. We had the son of a Holocaust survivor come to our home and speak to us. We saw news stories break during regarding Nazis and Holocaust victims. We found ourselves amazed by the people who risked their lives to help others. It was an amazing time for all of us. And then we finished the war and all the heroism of the war. War films I had never seen. And we talked about people we knew of who had fought in the war like my Uncle Kermit who was a front gunner on a supply boat in the Pacific as a teenager. How my mother was their age during the war. I remember the day my kids begged me not to make them watch another film, but several days later asked for just one more. I cannot express how much we enjoyed, no, that is not the right word.....experienced as we learned about the war. I would not trade this for a second of ease. I would trudge through all of those hard days again just to get to a week or two like this.

The second moment I have to share with you was surprising to me.
I was at the library one morning picking up some books for school. The librarian came to me and said, "Oh we were just talking about you this morning!" I thought, Oh, no!! What have I done now?!?!? Were they complaining about the number of books that I put on hold? Were they talking about how I always tell them how binding is coming loose on a book or a tape didn't work right? It must be something terrible!! Well, she went on for about 10 minutes telling me how they think my kids are just wonderful and that they just love them. My kids are polite, well behaved, friendly, nice......she just went on and on. I about fell on the floor. She said that my family is their favorite patrons. WOW!!!! I never saw it coming!! Hey, whenever they have a movie showing, dh and I are there to watch it. We eat all their popcorn. LOL!! Gee, I'd think that they would find us annoying or something. I mean I am there almost every week. I thought that they would be sick of me. I guess they figure I pay their salary with my late fees and books that I buy. She said that we are doing a wonderful job and to keep it up!! I told you it was a shocker!!

So, I will leave you now with a thing that happened today...
Dh was loading the dishwasher last night and just throwing everything in there. All is well. This afternoon, dd asks where her science project is. Hmmmmmm......Well, dad threw it down the sink. It looked like a glass of water. So, even in homeschool, the kid says....."My dad threw away my science project!!"