We continued this Waldorf homeschool style through a rough pregnancy and then a newborn-in-the-house stage. I had done school in the summer so we were ahead of schedule for the times I knew we would need to take off. There were times when we were just in survival mode due to illness or sleep deprivation (lots of tv and minimal school work). But we always got through those times somehow and back to our ideal homeschool schedule.
Our Waldorf phase lasted for five years. I had a friend who was starting to go more Classical with her homeschooling, and certain aspects of it really appealed to me. One of the biggest draws was being able to teach certain subjects to all of your kids at the same time. (We'd been doing entirely independent curricula with each child and at this point my third child was starting to receive real homeschool instruction). The other draw was the use of classics for literature that went along with the history being studied. I read The Well-Trained Mind (by Susan Weiss-Bauer) and planned out our new homeschool curriculum and schedule (quite a big project). I made the change to mostly Classical with my older two, but I still used the Waldorf curriculum with my Kindergartner. (It really is such a wonderfully fun way to teach letters, numbers, etc.) This change meant that my older two (at the time ages nine and eight) started doing more lecture-style, workbook based schoolwork and less hands-on creative projects. It also meant we started using Story of the World for history (one of my all-time faves), and for read aloud literature we started using Medieval classics (Robin Hood, Knights of the Round Table, Beowulf, etc.)
I received some other Classical curriculum ideas from my friend who I had copied and from The Well-Trained Mind. We spent more time doing school and a lot of it had now turned into workbooks. School was now taking us at least five hours on a good day whereas it had been taking us maybe two. I felt like we had a very academic homeschool and thought we were doing a better job because we were doing more subjects and were doing school for a longer time period. However, this schedule and style began to take a toll on us. Especially on my daughter, and on my relationship with her. My boys thrived on this type of school. But my daughter and I struggled through every single day. I didn't really think anything was wrong. I just thought that if I helped her get started earlier, or gave her more individual help, things would get better. She told me she wanted to go to public school, that her worst parts of the day were school, and that she felt like her brothers were smarter than her because they could get done with their stuff faster.
This schedule also posed new difficulties for me personally. School was taking longer which meant I had less time for myself. Any spare time I found was used on getting through my to-do list. I still had the two hours of child watch at the Y, so I still kept my sanity. But when 1 PM passed and we still weren't done with school, I slowly (or not-so-slowly) morphed into a mean, bossy, unsympathetic mom. Looking back at that year and a half of workbook intensive Classical homeschooling, I can see now that it was definitely our worst year. But even a month ago, I still didn't have a clue that we needed to make any big changes.
Then I went to the California Great Homeschool Convention. Besides homeschooling, going to this convention has been the absolute best thing I have ever done for our homeschooling career. It was two and a half days of lectures from various homeschool celebrities (curriculum writers, older homeschool parents that have already done what we're doing, family "experts", etc). The entire conference was full of the Spirit. I received so much inspiration. So many ideas. There were two main (huge) ideas that hit home to me and inspired some big changes in our homeschool. And there were so many little ideas that I've also been incorporating but have to do with little superficial changes. It was literally an outpouring of inspiration and ideas and took me a week to get all my thoughts in order and start implementing all the wonderful ideas I'd received.
The first huge idea came from Dr. Kathy Koch in her "8 Great Smarts: Discovering and Nurturing Your Child's Intelligences" lecture. There are eight different ways in which people learn. Everyone has more of some and less of others. The "smarts" are: Word Smart, Logic Smart, Picture Smart, Music Smart, Body Smart, Nature Smart, People Smart and Self Smart. Sitting in the lecture I (of course) started determining which Smarts my kids are. My boys both have a lot of Word Smart, Logic Smart, and People Smart. And (lightning bolt) my daughter is Picture Smart, Music Smart and Self Smart. Is it any wonder then that she had such a hard time with the way we had been doing school the last year and a half? We had cut out all the art and craft projects, and forced her in a little room with four other people doing lectures and workbooks! :(
The other inspirational idea came from Sarah Mackenzie. I went to two of her lectures and my friend gave me her "Focus & Align" Master Class Workbook. Just completing the workbook was life-changing. It helped me determine what my main goals and purposes for our homeschool are, and how to implement them into our daily routine so that they really happen. In the workbook, you visualize what your perfect homeschool day looks like. You imagine your kids in twenty years talking about what you were like as their homeschool mom (and what you wish they would say). You ask your kids what subject they would do all day if they could, and what their most frustrating part of the day is. You ask yourself what would "light you on fire" if you could teach it all day. And then you use all this info to make your "Rule of Six" (your top homeschool priorities) and your "Words to Live By" (reminders of how you want to be as a homeschool mom). So I did all this while I was sitting in other people's lectures. I had a good idea of what the changes were I needed to implement (cut the excess out). I got onto my excel school spreadsheet and started cutting things out. But then I got stuck. I just couldn't do any more. I knew it wasn't right yet, but what more could I cut out?
During the second of Sarah Mackenzie's lectures that I'd been to, I was sitting in the back of the room, on my computer, pretty much ignoring what was going on in the lecture. And then she started talking about cutting out the excess! She used the analogy of backpacking. When her husband first started backpacking he got all the cool gear he thought he'd need. Packed it all up. Started on his backpacking trip. And enroute regretted that he had so many unnecessary things in his pack. (My husband and I go backpacking and are familiar with this experience). Now when he packs for a backpacking trip, he takes the absolute minimum he possibly can. Even to the extreme of cutting off the handle of his toothbrush. Upon hearing this analogy I immediately went back to my excel spreadsheet and knew what else I could cut out. Literally EVERYTHING that wasn't absolutely essential. We didn't need five different writing exercises. (My boys hate writing). If they're already writing for scriptures (we copy a scripture every day), then why do they also need to be writing for Writing, Literature, History and again for Grammar? Every day we were doing our main Math workbook (still using Waldorf Oak Meadow by the way), plus Life of Fred, plus Beast Academy, plus a Logic exercise. So I cut all that out and we now do one Math supplement each day instead of all three. Oh how liberating this was. To recognize the essentials and cut everything else out.
It has now been almost a month since I went to the Homeschool Convention and since I implemented some major changes to our homeschool. I would define our new and improved homeschool method as a mix between Waldorf, Classical and Charlotte Mason. We spend three hours a day, three days a week "doing" school. We only do the most important things and I've combined a lot of our subjects to help cut out the unnecessary (we break apart our daily scripture grammatically, we find spelling and vocab words out of our own writing samples or the literature book we're reading). In addition to cutting out almost all of our workbooks, we've incorporated more visual aids, art projects and music for my daughter's sake. A lot of our time is spent on classic literature (my recently acknowledged passion thanks to the "Focus & Align" workbook). For the preservation of all our sanity, especially my own, we have at least two hours of personal free time every day. And we now have time to play together again like we used to. I am happier and more peaceful. My kids are happier, especially my daughter. School is fun, and life is full of joy.
The moral of our homeschool journey is: don't be afraid of change. Seek inspiration and you will find it. Do what works for you and not what's working for someone else. And above all: enjoy your kids and your homeschooling experience!
7/2019 Update: Three years later, this post still applies. My youngest is now 7, so our days of Waldorf are waning. I tried to implement parts of the Charlotte Mason approach, and succeeded for awhile, but I slowly started cutting it out because it required more effort (planning?) on my part, rather than just following along in our books. So now, I would define our homeschooling method as Minimalist Classical Christian. My go-to resources are Come Follow Me, Story of the World, The Well Trained Mind, Institute for Excellence in Writing, Oak Meadow Maths, and youtube (we love CrashCourse!). I've been pretty good at keeping the excess out, but when I feel like a child needs something, I add it back in. Over the past couple of months I've been self-reflecting about our schooling and what I need to do better. So we're now also using Center for Lit, and I'm very excited to start using Berean Builders for science. All of these resources are Christian. I can't use charter school money for any of them. But it's worth it. And all of them follow along chronologically through history - even science! So what they're learning in science, writing, literature, and history all build upon and reinforce each other. Pretty great!
The first huge idea came from Dr. Kathy Koch in her "8 Great Smarts: Discovering and Nurturing Your Child's Intelligences" lecture. There are eight different ways in which people learn. Everyone has more of some and less of others. The "smarts" are: Word Smart, Logic Smart, Picture Smart, Music Smart, Body Smart, Nature Smart, People Smart and Self Smart. Sitting in the lecture I (of course) started determining which Smarts my kids are. My boys both have a lot of Word Smart, Logic Smart, and People Smart. And (lightning bolt) my daughter is Picture Smart, Music Smart and Self Smart. Is it any wonder then that she had such a hard time with the way we had been doing school the last year and a half? We had cut out all the art and craft projects, and forced her in a little room with four other people doing lectures and workbooks! :(
The other inspirational idea came from Sarah Mackenzie. I went to two of her lectures and my friend gave me her "Focus & Align" Master Class Workbook. Just completing the workbook was life-changing. It helped me determine what my main goals and purposes for our homeschool are, and how to implement them into our daily routine so that they really happen. In the workbook, you visualize what your perfect homeschool day looks like. You imagine your kids in twenty years talking about what you were like as their homeschool mom (and what you wish they would say). You ask your kids what subject they would do all day if they could, and what their most frustrating part of the day is. You ask yourself what would "light you on fire" if you could teach it all day. And then you use all this info to make your "Rule of Six" (your top homeschool priorities) and your "Words to Live By" (reminders of how you want to be as a homeschool mom). So I did all this while I was sitting in other people's lectures. I had a good idea of what the changes were I needed to implement (cut the excess out). I got onto my excel school spreadsheet and started cutting things out. But then I got stuck. I just couldn't do any more. I knew it wasn't right yet, but what more could I cut out?
During the second of Sarah Mackenzie's lectures that I'd been to, I was sitting in the back of the room, on my computer, pretty much ignoring what was going on in the lecture. And then she started talking about cutting out the excess! She used the analogy of backpacking. When her husband first started backpacking he got all the cool gear he thought he'd need. Packed it all up. Started on his backpacking trip. And enroute regretted that he had so many unnecessary things in his pack. (My husband and I go backpacking and are familiar with this experience). Now when he packs for a backpacking trip, he takes the absolute minimum he possibly can. Even to the extreme of cutting off the handle of his toothbrush. Upon hearing this analogy I immediately went back to my excel spreadsheet and knew what else I could cut out. Literally EVERYTHING that wasn't absolutely essential. We didn't need five different writing exercises. (My boys hate writing). If they're already writing for scriptures (we copy a scripture every day), then why do they also need to be writing for Writing, Literature, History and again for Grammar? Every day we were doing our main Math workbook (still using Waldorf Oak Meadow by the way), plus Life of Fred, plus Beast Academy, plus a Logic exercise. So I cut all that out and we now do one Math supplement each day instead of all three. Oh how liberating this was. To recognize the essentials and cut everything else out.
It has now been almost a month since I went to the Homeschool Convention and since I implemented some major changes to our homeschool. I would define our new and improved homeschool method as a mix between Waldorf, Classical and Charlotte Mason. We spend three hours a day, three days a week "doing" school. We only do the most important things and I've combined a lot of our subjects to help cut out the unnecessary (we break apart our daily scripture grammatically, we find spelling and vocab words out of our own writing samples or the literature book we're reading). In addition to cutting out almost all of our workbooks, we've incorporated more visual aids, art projects and music for my daughter's sake. A lot of our time is spent on classic literature (my recently acknowledged passion thanks to the "Focus & Align" workbook). For the preservation of all our sanity, especially my own, we have at least two hours of personal free time every day. And we now have time to play together again like we used to. I am happier and more peaceful. My kids are happier, especially my daughter. School is fun, and life is full of joy.
The moral of our homeschool journey is: don't be afraid of change. Seek inspiration and you will find it. Do what works for you and not what's working for someone else. And above all: enjoy your kids and your homeschooling experience!
7/2019 Update: Three years later, this post still applies. My youngest is now 7, so our days of Waldorf are waning. I tried to implement parts of the Charlotte Mason approach, and succeeded for awhile, but I slowly started cutting it out because it required more effort (planning?) on my part, rather than just following along in our books. So now, I would define our homeschooling method as Minimalist Classical Christian. My go-to resources are Come Follow Me, Story of the World, The Well Trained Mind, Institute for Excellence in Writing, Oak Meadow Maths, and youtube (we love CrashCourse!). I've been pretty good at keeping the excess out, but when I feel like a child needs something, I add it back in. Over the past couple of months I've been self-reflecting about our schooling and what I need to do better. So we're now also using Center for Lit, and I'm very excited to start using Berean Builders for science. All of these resources are Christian. I can't use charter school money for any of them. But it's worth it. And all of them follow along chronologically through history - even science! So what they're learning in science, writing, literature, and history all build upon and reinforce each other. Pretty great!
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