Utopian Plans vs. Everyday Reality

Many are the plans in a man’s heart, but it’s the Lord’s purpose that prevails.  Proverbs 19:21

Raise your hand if you ever make plans that don’t go as planned.

If you’re not raising your hand, then this post is likely not for you.  But for anyone else, let me give you a little background.

I’ve struggled with a super-planner-somewhat-Type-A personality since… birth.  After God blessed me with children, I also became a highly distractible mom that couldn’t remember anything. Over time, I’ve come to use the super-planner part of my make-up to help me cope with this not-so-pleasant distractibility problem. What this means is… I make plans (and oftentimes go overboard with them), but they don’t always get accomplished due to various circumstances called life (and the fact that I went overboard with them in the first place). I have oh-so-many checklists with absolutely everything written down because I cannot rely on my mind to recall even the simplest of thoughts at this point in my life.

The point is, every year we go through interruptions. We’ve homeschooled through chainsaw chaos. We’ve homeschooled through illness, an eye surgery, and the first trimester of pregnancy. And throughout these homeschooling years, we’ve faced deaths in the family and other unforeseen circumstances. Our family does not homeschool only when it’s easy. Our children get to see what living life is really like because they are a constant part of that life. And life is not perfect.

The plan vs. reality for 2013-2014
{For more details of our original plans, click here.}

“For the coming school year, the main focus of our school days will be reading (click here for our reading plan), copywork (click here for an introduction to copywork/dictation/narration), and notebooking (click here for our free printable notebooking pages and setup).”

The plan?  At first it was Latin just for Stephen, but I later decided maybe David and Levi could also at least learn the Latin and Greek alphabet.
The reality? …but then my first trimester of pregnancy hit and I lost all motivation.
Stephen (our 5th grader) will end this year approximately halfway through Latin’s Not So Tough Level 3. David (our 2nd grader) and Levi (our preschooler) were just not ready to do much beyond coloring pages. We switched midyear to watching the Song School Latin Level 1 DVD, and they loved it!  Oh, and we dropped Greek because it was just another task on our to-do list that I was failing to complete.

The plan? Read through three volumes of Story of the World (SOTW).
The reality? We finished SOTW Volume 2 and 3 this year.  We are currently listening to the SOTW Vol 4 audio in the car. If it had not been for the audios, we would have only made it through Volume 2 this year because I had trouble staying awake to read to them in the evenings as I had done previously.

The plan? We were going to read from the God’s Design… series and from Apologia’s Exploring Creation with Astronomy. It’s not listed in my original plan, but we were also hoping to complete a notebook with foldables for Exploring Creation with Astronomy.
The reality? Those plans fell by the wayside after about Chapter 4 or 5. For some reason, I struggle with structure to our science and end up just doing whatever we feel like to explore various science topics. This would be called “delight-led learning,” which is how I truly enjoy approaching science. For our reading selections, we instead used Mia’s easier corresponding e-books, Creation Science for Kids.

The plan?  After David finished Level 1 of Prescripts, I was hoping to switch him to Level 2…
The reality?  …but he had very-much trouble connecting his letters together.  I made a handwriting book to bridge the gap for him to better prepare him for Book 2 (but we have since created our own copywork program that we enjoy much more)! If your child has had this problem, go and download the check out the Script-n-Scribe Letter Connector!

The plan? Read all of the books on our reading schedule.
The reality? We did not like one of the books on our reading plan. It ended up textbook-ish, not living book-ish. So, we dropped World of William Penn and added Gabriel and the Hour Book (even though it did not cover the same time period). We also used a couple of the books (10,000 Days of Thunder and Tensions in the Gulf) as references instead of read-alouds, and we exchanged reading the Shakespearean tragedies for reading more comedies. (Our children were
traumatized by Hamlet, and there are simply too many great books to read to be traumatized by heart-wrenching stories at this stage.) As far as our schedule was concerned, we finished some books much later than planned (like Huguenot Garden), and we fell behind on some of our other “reading connection” readings because I struggled with staying awake for a few months. We eventually finished up all of our reading connections and even added a whole bunch of other books to our reading plan during the second semester but did not bother with correlating the books we added!

The plan? Our notebooking activities will be completed at different points throughout the day.  For more about our Classical Notebook and for free printables and instructions on how to set up a notebook, click here. 

The reality?  Only Stephen completed all 24 weeks of science notebooking pages, our Timeline notebook (which already had all the timeline in it) was only used as a reference this year, we did not notebook for Fine Arts (but instead practiced extra painting and drawing), and we were not consistent with our daily notebooking activities. However, the boys did improve quite a bit on their free-hand drawings of the world.

The plan?  Our second grader will attempt memory master proofing for the first time this year. Our fifth grader and I will attempt three-cycles of memory master proofing this year.
The reality?  Stephen did it! All three cycles!! (He had previously been a memory master for each of the three cycles, but this was a major accomplishment for him in that he is sort of graduating from the natural “grammar” stage and is just not as excited about reciting information as he is about exploring and applying and discussing the memory work now. But he is also a determined young man who desperately wanted to attempt triple-cycle memory master this year.)

…his mother, on the other hand, just could not remember the timeline (but I had most everything else memorized from all three cycles). Imagine Stephen’s exasperation and amusement as he reminded me of all the silly timeline memory work prompts I’ve given him in years past to remember what comes next! David was not truly interested in pursuing memory master as I had originally thought, and I wasn’t going to unnecessarily push him through it as a second grader when he lacked the interest and motivation. Maybe next year? (Or maybe this isn’t even something we should pursue? It certainly causes unneeded stress in our home!)

So… what about the schedule?

Reality? Our schedule did not look like that. It looked more like this:

9:00 – 9:30 AM: Mom reads a bit over breakfast from reading connections.
9:30 – 10:00 AM: Bible Study & Prescripts
10:00 – 10:30 AM: Break
10:30 – 11:30 AM: Math
11:30 – 1:00 PM: Break
1:00 – 3:00 PM: Language Arts (juggling two children through copywork or writing, English Grammar, and spelling (and phonics))
Rest of the day: reading, history or science projects… if I could stay awake

Really, if I were completely honest, I should not even include times. Sometimes our school work wasn’t started until 10AM, and sometimes we were working until 7PM. There were days we skipped subjects entirely. It just depended on Mom’s exhaustion level and napping schedule. We practiced memory work, but a lot of times it was when I was cooking or cleaning. My technique is:  Start a memory work song (i.e., “Napoleon Bonaparte…”) and leave it hanging. The boys have to finish it or they tend to go insane. Another technique:  Hum the song, and they will start singing it.  For Stephen, however, it was much more structured because he was reciting all three cycles of memory work at proofing time. We reviewed memory work by subject for all three cycles, splitting it up across each week to make it more doable. (We also listen to our memory work CDs in the car.)

What made this school year the best yet…

Reading! During the spring semester, we spent more time reading and less time on history and science projects. When I was unable to read aloud to the boys, we either used audiobooks or Stephen took over the out-loud reading.

What we read or listened to as a family:

Our reading connections (from which we read excerpts as stated on our reading plan; our science readings were on the iPad):

Stephen’s independent reading this year included over 60 books (not all are pictured):

And… here’s the kicker:  Our “I don’t like books” son started reading independently at the close of this year without my prompting! He asks if it’s okay to read such-and-such now.  (Yes, son, yes!)

This photo is just sheer joy! I could shout it from the rooftops!

What I’ve learned about plan vs. reality

When things don’t go as planned…  I can count it as failure or count it as growth.  I have an opportunity to show my children how to deal with failure in a way that will equip them for a lifetime.

It has been wonderful to get back to the basics and simply read great books together as a family. And our family is growing (emotionally, spiritually, and physically), which is such a great blessing.

But…especially this time of year when so many homeschooling moms and dads get discouraged, doubt themselves, and consider giving up as they compare themselves to utopian ideals, I just want you to know that our  days are rarely hunky-dory, by-the-plan, and picture-perfect around here. (That’s why I refer to them as School Daze.) And I dare say our days would not be hunky-dory, by-the-plan, and picture-perfect around here even if we didn’t homeschool.

I’d rather have my children with me through it all.

Wouldn’t you?