I always look forward to sharing our plan vs reality at the end of each year. It’s my chance to show you just how much we don’t have it all together. So… here we are once again, looking back on another year gone somewhat awry.
About this time last year, we were welcoming a fourth baby boy into our family. As we adjusted to life with a sweet lil ole young’n, I shared about my oh-no-I’m-a-homeschool-mom-and-have-to-teach-three-other-boys-while-balancing-a-newborn panic attack and my husband’s Mr. Fixit plan of a tapered start. Well, the truth is… we never made it to a full-fledged schedule as my sleep-deprived mind envisioned. We were still “tapering” our school year up until our last week of school. Isn’t that refreshing and unimpressive all at the same time?
To get a feel for what the plan was, you’ll want to refer back to Of Curriculum and Schedules and a Tapered Start. And then… you can laugh.
So, first, let me tell you what we didn’t do.
- Read the Acts & Facts Timeline Cards for each history sentence
- Read the Acts & Facts Science Cards for each science fact
- Do extra fine arts activities (except for painting the American flag with oil paints, which turned out to be a bit of a mess! We have nothing-zilch-nada from this past year to put into the county fair.)
- Do extra Latin (unless you count just watching the Song School Latin Level 1 DVD)
- Weekly History & Geography Activities (outside of reading historical fiction and map tracing & drawing)
- Weekly Science Activities (we just had a crazy science binge over Christmas break)
- Consistently add to our notebooks each week. Instead we focused on copywork and only occasionally added to our notebooks.
- Grapevine Studies New Testament Catechism (we spent the entire year on Old Testament)
- Latin’s Not So Tough (for our sixth grader)
- All About Spelling Level 7 (our sixth grader only made it through all of AAS Level 6, so we will have to pick back up where we were in Level 7 later this summer)
- Lyrical Life Science (6th grader)
- Classic Elementary Chemistry
- It Couldn’t Just Happen as a read-aloud (I figured it was sufficient for our sixth grader to read it independently)
Man! I guess that’s pretty disappointing. But, alas, we did work up to a “full” schedule of core work at least (core work meaning reading, writing, arithmetic, and memory-work-some-of-the-time.) So, for the sake of our annual blog book and portfolio, let me recount what we did do.
We did…
- Math lessons and math fact practice (Stephen even willingly and wholeheartedly finished two additional Life of Fred books – and started two others – after he finished Saxon 7/6. Would you believe he does not normally like math? Thankyaverymuch, Life of Fred.)
- All About Spelling and All About Reading
- Write IEW papers (U.S. History-Based Lessons for Stephen, Bible Heroes for David – although David did not make it through the entire book)
- Practice English grammar charts, sentence task analysis, and parsing
- Handwriting/copywork via Prescripts books for David & Stephen (When, oh when, will their handwriting improve? Penmanship practice seems all for naught when I look at their handwritten notes!)
- Handwriting/copywork via Handwriting Without Tears for Levi (Until we switched gears to Script-n-Scribe Roller Coaster Writer)
- Copy many of George Washington’s “Rules of Civility” (print copywork for David)
- Introduce David to English grammar concepts
- Read a whole bunch of books (according to our reading plan. The only thing we dropped from our read-alouds was Our Constitution Rocks, which Stephen read independently. It’s a fabulous book, but we just never caught up with our reading plans after we returned from our trip out west in March/April.)
- Read selections from Treasury of Virtues
- Finish Grapevine Studies: Old Testament Catechism
- An American Revolution Study, An Early 19th Century Study, and A Civil War History Study (All first semester, too! Second semester, we did nothing extra for history beyond reading historical fiction.)
- Make a Model Lung, Make a Pumping Model Heart, Model Digestion, Build a Kidney Filtration Demonstration & Kidney Model (all during our winter break)
- Master (or almost master) drawing the United States freehand from memory (Stephen did anyway. I still haven’t moved beyond the northwest quadrant!)
Reading made up the bulk of what we did, so to recap that part of our school year:
Our read alouds (or listen-alouds) included…
We also read a ton of picture books, but I was too lazy to sort through them all to take a photo. (We pretty much read everything referenced in our reading plan for this school year.)
Stephen’s reading included the following plus a whole bunch of Usborne books unrelated to American history…
In fact, we are having trouble remembering all that he read. This would be very poor bookkeeping on my part.
David, our former “I don’t like to read” child, read some leveled readers (which were his required reading), plus the first 15 AIO Imagination Station books (fantastic selections for historical fiction)…
He ended up starting the Magic Tree House books at the end of last school year, so I’m not sure exactly how many he officially read during the 2015-2016 school year. In addition to these, he also read several Usborne books (the Illustrated Stories collection are some of his favorites). Of all that was accomplished in our home over the past twelve months, this is what makes me jump for joy. Well, this, and Levi learning to read his first books (which were Bob books and All About Reading Level 1 readers). Reading is just… my favorite.
So, there are lots of things we didn’t do. We didn’t ever get beyond the “tapering” stage of our school year. We didn’t get around to being crafty or creative with much of anything (especially second semester). We didn’t even use our long lists-of-links at all this year (hopefully someone else out there did!).
But one trick to finding joy in the journey is not to count what you didn’t do, but to count what you did do. And many times the most important things you’ve accomplished are not the things that look good on a transcript – or a blog post. So… for those who are reflecting on a rough year, think about those blessings in your life whom God has called you to parent. We were never guaranteed to get it all right. We are guaranteed that He that has begun a good work in us will “carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 1:6)
We are guaranteed that we can do all things through Christ who strengthens us. (Philippians 4:13)
If all of our efforts as parents are offered as a gift for our Savior, it doesn’t even matter how we did compared to some other standard. All that matters is that we give Him our best and allow Him to cover our many mistakes (and boy, do I make many mistakes! Thank you, Lord, that love covers a multitude of sins).
I’ll close with a yearly reminder about what I’ve learned regarding 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?