curriculum | Our GPS

So I’ve been quiet lately on the blog. I know its not new, I haven’t really gotten in the groove of finding a good time during my week to write, or to exercise, or to have alone time with God.

WorryIt seems I haven’t really gotten into a groove on anything yet in this homeschooling world.

I’m feeling a little defeated here lately. Well, more than a little.

To be quite honest, I’m feeling crushed in more ways than one.

My feelings are hurt, my heart hurts, my soul hurts.

I know that homeschooling is the correct path for our family. I know that without a doubt. I didn’t ask or expect that it be easy, that was never part of the deal. But I didn’t expect it to be so soul crushing, so often.

D told me today, that he just wasn’t one of those kids who do school. HUH? I didn’t (and don’t) know how to react to that. I have always been the kind of person who loves learning, reading, and trying new skills. Why my kids wouldn’t feel the same confuses and baffles me.

But although the sentiment baffled me, it didn’t surprise me. We have been struggling to do any school type things. He doesn’t want to do worksheets. He doesn’t want to write. He doesn’t want to put the work in to learn how to read.

It’s been frustrating because he is so smart that he can (and does) learn so easily, but to hear this from Devin, hurts my heart. It tells me that what I am doing with him for school isn’t right.

I feel like I have been pouring my time out into planning, researching, scheduling, etc. and nothing seems to really be working. All my kids want to do is play: dolls, house, kitchen, games. You name it, they’ll play it! But they won’t play those things if it’s school, if it’s planned or scripted. I just can’t seem to find the special motivating words to get them to do their actual work.

I’m on the who-knows-how-many schedule revision and hope it will work, that is, if I can get anyone else to pay attention to it. I plan and plan and plan and still, 3 days into the week we are so far behind it frustrates me so much!

Why?!!! What am I doing wrong? I know I want this process to be fun. I want it to be more than sitting at a desk all day. I want it to be learning as we go and on the go. But getting to that, to where I am ok with that, to where I can find a program that jives with that, is very frustrating and heart wrenching and soul crushing.

Perhaps (certainly actually) it is the work of the enemy, trying again to get me to waste time and be frustrated, so I give in, so I quit altogether. He attacks what is good and right. So I guess I should be flattered with the attack.

But it’s hard to keep waging that war day in day out.

Today in my not-often-enough prayer time, I found this passage that spoke loudly to me.

Isaiah 8:11

God spoke strongly to me, grabbed me with both hands and warned me not to go along with the people. He said:

“Don’t be like this people

always afraid somebody is plotting against them.

Don’t fear what they fear.

Don’t take on their worries.

If you’re going to worry,

worry about The Holy. Fear God-of-the-Angel-Armies.

The Holy can be either a Hiding Place

or a Boulder blocking your way.

The Rock standing in the willful way

of both houses of Israel.

A barbed-wire Fence preventing trespass

to the citizens of Jerusalem.

Many of them are going to run into that Rock

and get their bones broken,

Get tangled up in that barbed wire

and not get free of it.”

Wow.

Maybe that doesn’t speak strongly to you, but when it began and immediately ‘God spoke strongly,’ I sat up and listened.

I think my need for a set curriculum and a checklist is my boulder standing in the way of our success. It is the barbed wire that I am tangled up in; it is breaking my spirit if not my bones.

I need (and my kids need) routine. We also need a bit of freedom. We really need freedom within the routine, to play, to be free, to be kids. And I need the freedom from the checklist of what schoolwork still needs to be done today.

The Rock of the Curriculum Giant, is firmly in the middle of our path. It is blocking the way of our school success, and I suppose I need to move it aside. It is hard for me to even admit that I need to set it aside. That it isn’t working, but it’s not.

It’s hurting our relationships. It’s hurting our friendships. Its hurting our daily lives. It’s damaging our family.

But is the need to set it aside, just a smoke screen for Satan to get his hands on my planning mind again? To get me to once again, start over with the plan? To waste more time on trying to figure it out?

I don’t know the answer… I don’t know the next step. But I trust in Him and His plan for our family, I just need to find it!

Wait with me and see how I can free myself (with God’s help) from this particular barbed wire so we can continue down God’s Path.

Shira

Wow! I thought I would enjoy blogging and started off strong. Then I came to a screeching halt as I got overwhelmed with the reality of homeschooling, planning, learning, teaching, scheduling and trying not to sink!

I have been wanting to get back at it, and have decided it is not so much about the quantity of the writings but the content, getting my thoughts out and not worrying about what others think. I was putting too much pressure on myself to ‘be godly’ and evangelize in a way obviously not comfortable to me. Instead, I am now choosing to just write, hope that something I say matters to someone, even if that someone is just myself!

So here goes!

In yesterday’s conversation with God, He made clear to me that I needed to not worry about being judged, instead to just think about the message He wanted for me. I was reminded that He had earlier told me to study Psalm 119 this year (which I must admit has been seriously underlooked by me.) I have recently bought a bible in The Message format, to perhaps enlighten my study in a new way, so I am choosing to begin my blog today with Psalm 119 alpha (vs 1).

He says:

“You’re blessed when you stay on course,

walking steadily on the road revealed by God.

You’re blessed when you follow his directions,

doing your best to find him.”

WOW!

How pertinent is that passage to this blog! I don’t know why, but I am still amazed at just how clearly God can speak to us through his word. I feel that I HAVE been working to “stay on course, walking steadily on the road revealed by God,” in our homeschooling journey. I have been steady in this oh-so-hard learning curve. This so challenging beginning phase where our whole lives have been changed and turned around in a whole new way.

A few times in these past 6 months I have really had to THINK about whether or not this is what we need to be doing. Tempted to just call and send her back to school on the bus. To throw in the towel and return to the old public school life! But my initial desire to homeschool, was not by my choice, but by God’s nudging. Or maybe not nudging, but pushing, or even shoving us to do it. He ‘revealed the road’ to me, about a year ago, during our then study of Revolutionary Parenting. It was clearly said to me that I needed to work on the relationship with my children, particularly Skylar, and the way to do that was by homeschooling her. I could not get the idea out of my head or my heart, could not find any reason NOT to, so we researched and learned and here I am, working hard to ‘stay on course!’ We committed to trying it for 2 years at the beginning, so 2 years I need to stick with it. Don’t get me wrong, I love, love, love it, but it is SO hard!

I started by creating my own curriculum, focusing on a sort of unit study based on the days of creation. I planned and re-planned, researched and worked. I thought I had it figured out! I was pleased with the plan, feeling strongly that it was shown to me by God several times in the planning process. But in the day to day reality, the plan was just not getting followed thru. We were behind before we really got started, things were thrown in, and I never seemed to have the time to really get it together. We would skip things, postpone things and all around drop things. I wanted to make it work, but we were both getting frustrated by the length of our days and the lack of continuity.

After a particularly horrific day in January, I felt a change needed to be made. One big reason I felt drawn to homeschool was to NOT be constantly fighting with Skylar. I felt that our relationship in public school was a rotation of reprimands and hurry-up we gotta go’s! Go to the bus, go do homework, go to the activities, go to bed. No time for cuddles or loving or enjoying each other. And here we were, fighting non-stop all day! Do your math! Do your spelling! Do your writing! It was worse than before.

Now, as an mature Christian, I know that this was the work of the enemy. Trying to get us to quit. Trying to make us more miserable at home than we were before. Trying to tell me I was incompetent, we were failing, I was doing her a dis-service by teaching her myself.

I named that discouragement as the work of the enemy and sent it packing! I don’t have time to be discouraged! I need to be encouraged! To be filled with hope and peace, not despair and rejection. When that down in the dumps feeling hits, I remind myself to remember where each of these come from and immediately turn back to the Word!

So, after that awful day, I retraced my steps back to the original path. I found my pile of brochures from the homeschool conference last year, and started looking through it. I had honestly not even looked at it since I got home last March, and was wanting to just go thru to get rid of the junk. But this one program really got to me. I started looking, researching and learning about it. After about a week of late nights, comparing info, reading blogs and praying, I made the choice to try Heart of Dakota. I closely compared Sonlight, My Father’s World and Heart of Dakota, and really, I just liked the heart (no pun intended) of HOD, the reading list really appealed to me, and I thought it would for my daughter as well. It is full of classics like the Little House Books, Helen Keller’s biography, The Littles, Misty of Chinoteague, Ginger Pye; a lot of books we already had on our shelf, waiting and wanting to be read. And best of all, it gives me a framework within which to read them, discuss them and apply them to our schooling. It was just what I needed to breathe some life into our classroom day!

I am hoping we have taken a good turn with this program. After about a month of researching, decision making, searching for books, we have just begun the new HOD curriculum for both Skylar and Devin. We’re using Little Hands to Heaven for Devin, a light pre-school program that begins to teach letters, numbers, counting with a healthy dose of Bible reading. One baby Bible story (or part of one) daily, enough to begin to get those stories into his consciousness, to get a familiarity with the Words of God! Both kids listen, sing the songs and do the action verses, so it has been a fun time for us.

For Skylar, I chose Beyond Little Hearts for His Glory, a package geared toward 6-8 year olds. It also has a strong bible component, great integrated history lessons (beginning with the Discovery of America) and light science. Choose your own math and phonics programs, so we can continue with our Singapore Math which is a good fit for Sky, and a reading program focusing on good classic (living) books. We are one week in, and enjoying it so far, maybe a little behind, but I think but we will be able to shake it out.

I hope to continue to plug away at my original science plan, using creation as our units. We are beginning Day 4 this week, Planets, Sun and Moon. We are quite a bit behind, but I think we can continue along and just spend less time on the animal units than I had originally planned, hoping to go more in depth on them in the next several years using Apologia science to beef up the HOD science (really because Skylar LOVES animals and currently wants to be a vet, so exploring that in depth will be great for her.)

So as we begin this week, I pray that I am “walking steadily on the road revealed by God.” As in the past, I have looked to Him in times of trouble and discouragement and am graciously rewarded by His revelation of exactly where He wants us to walk and how. I don’t think that we were straying, because I had His conviction that we were beginning correctly for us. I think that we needed to get some of the rough edges smoothed, the initial growth pains eased, the transition completed before we could really open our hearts to this program. I needed to know that I did not have to do it all alone, that I could not do it on my own, that others with more knowledge and experience have good material I can rely on to help me teach my children. Now our school room is finally that, a school room, it is (mostly) organized, calm and hopefully a place for fun and learning and loving. A place to love learning, love each other and love God!

My prayer for today is that we will be blessed in this new phase of our homeschool journey, as Psalm 119 promises.

You’re blessed when you follow his directions,

doing your best to find him.

I am re-dedicated to “doing my best” to find Him in our homeschooling, following His directions and walking along His Path. We are, after all, called God’s Path School!

Now, to hit those great books!

Shira