Our first year of homeschooling is coming to a close and I find myself in the same spot where I wrote this nearly one year ago. I wrote out five goals I had for our first year of homeschooling while sitting on the porch of our family cabin in the mountains.

We decided last minute to come spend the week here at the cabin this week and it has been such a beautiful week in more ways than just the absolutely perfect weather we are experiencing so far! Our family needed this time and I am thankful for the opportunity to be here this week.

I’d like to take some time right now and reflect back on these goals and assess how we met them or didn’t meet them.

1. I want to put an intense focus on instilling the truths of God’s Word into the hearts of my little girls.

This is certainly not a goal that I will work on for just a year, say I’ve met the goal at the end of the year and move on! This will be an ongoing lifetime goal for our family. It is at the very root of why we’ve chosen the homeschooling path for our children. For our family, homeschooling affords us the best opportunity to be able to teach our children the way of the Lord as it is described in Deuteronomy 6:6-8, These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads.

Some very good habits have started in our family this year and some improvements can definitely be made. We are in a very good routine of Morning Bible Time. After breakfast, the girls play together while I clean up the kitchen and get started on the tasks for that day and then around 9:30ish it’s Bible Time! If we don’t do Bible Time (which is rare) the girls are quick to remind me that we didn’t do it. My goal in establishing this routine is that the girls will desire a daily time in the Word of God even when it is their decision to have the time in their day or not. They have no choice now, but it is a favorite time of day when lots of good discussions come up. I imagine the older they get the deeper these discussions will become and I look forward to that.

Dave has started having a Family Devotional time at breakfast. It can be chaotic with everyone eating so it doesn’t happen every morning but again, it’s starting the routine that is important. I know some mornings Dave and I look at each other and wonder if ANYONE was listening! It won’t be long and this will become a good place for us to talk and connect daily with our children.

One area of improvement is incorporating Little Bug’s AWANA verses more into our Bible Time. She always seems to know her verses before I can go over them with her because every day during Room Time she listens to her Cubby CD which tells the verses and stories. But I’d like to be more involved with her in this program because it is excellent! I think the way to do this is to schedule it into our Morning Bible Time and to keep her book on the kitchen table so we are reminded to talk about her weekly Bible verse during meals. Hopefully we are in the tail end of mealtime craziness phase and can really start to use mealtimes as a way for our family to talk and connect daily.

2. I truly want this year to be jam-packed full of FUN.

I would say this was a success, thanks to our Ready-Made Preschool curriculum. Every week was filled with fun learning activities. Little Bug always looked forward to seeing what was in her workbox for the day. There was such a good variety of activities that Little Bug never got tired or bored of the curriculum. I truly put a TON of effort into finding curriculum last year that would help our first year of homeschooling be FUN and I think I was very successful in that!

We took our learning outside the home which is a perk of homeschooling that I love. Whether it was going to an event, an attraction or even just going out into our backyard, I enjoyed this year so much and it has made me even more excited about homeschooling because this is only the beginning. The world is our classroom and I love the freedom in that!

This coming school year I hope we can take school outside of our home even more now that the girls are a little older!

3. While I want our focus to be on playing and having fun together, I do have academic goals for each of my daughters.

Little Bug – She knows her letters and letter sounds and that was my main academic goal for her this year! I didn’t realize how much she would learn outside of letters and letter sounds with Ready-Made Preschool. She learned about animal habitats, seasons, dinosaurs, geography, why we have day and night, the solar system, the weather, basic addition, subtraction and division and more! I’d say that’s pretty good for a 4 year old!

Sweet Pea – There have been drastic changes in Sweet Pea academically this year. Of course, at the beginning of this year she had just turned two and now she is nearly three. This is a big year of growth for any child. In August, she would barely sit through one board book! Now, she will sit and listen to book after book after book and they aren’t all board books. She loves to read longer books too! I am thrilled with this progress because a love of books and reading is foundational to our method of homeschooling! We love to learn through reading books.

I started ABC School with her in February. My goal with this has been to just introduce the letters to her, and get her used to some structured learning time (which she absolutely loves). She will sing the Alphabet Song all day long but I am not sure how many letters she can identify yet. I know she will learn her letters next year as I do Ready-Made Preschool Level 1 with her!

4. Our days will be structured even though we officially have no babies in the house for the first time in four years.

From the time my babies were born, I have scheduled their days. When they were real little (2 and a newborn and 3yrs and 1yr old), scheduled days were imperative to my sanity and theirs! They thrived off days that went just as the days before.

This year, however, I saw that we all needed a little more variety into our days. Our days were still very scheduled as I believe preschoolers thrive off structure, but our day to day schedule was way more varied this year. The girls are older and have opinions about what they’d like to do. There were mornings when they would wake up and all they wanted to do was play together and I’d let them!! I wasn’t going to stop that just to keep to our schedule! I’d let them play together and then rearrange the day so we could get back on track for lunch/naptimes because those activities are still non-negotiable in this house and will happen at the same time every day. Other mornings they would wake up best enemies and I would know that we either needed to get out of the house for the morning or we could have an extra long school time in the morning to keep everyone busy doing things.

I like the flexibility not having to be so scheduled affords us now! I think we will be moving more towards structuring our days by three blocks of time: Morning, Afternoon and Evening. There will be certain activities that take place within those blocks of time every day but not necessarily in the same order as they happened the day before! This will afford us all the variety I think older kids (and especially a kid like Little Bug) need.

5. I want homeschooling to become our family lifestyle, our way of life.

We had some major changes take place in our family this homeschool year. The biggest change is that Dave now works from home! This has been a HUGE blessing to our entire family. Honestly, at first, I was skeptical because, during the day, the home is my workplace and I didn’t want Daddy coming in messing up what I had going on!!! But, after a brief transitional phase, all four of us transitioned beautifully and we all recognize the blessing of being together in our home! It has definitely created a new dynamic in our family, one that allows us all to be more connected with each other. We are not sure how long Dave will work from home. I know I will miss his presence in the house during the day when he does return to the office in the future…or maybe God will allow him to work from home long-term. We don’t know at this point!

We definitely have a mentality that learning takes place every day all day long and not just during our declared “school times”. I love this. I love that I am with my children every day teaching them about everything under the sun. Let’s be real here for a minute, shall we? There are days when I want to just run away from it all! Days where if I hear “Mommy!!!” one more time I feel I will scream or days when I feel more like a referee than a mother. But when it comes down to it, and especially on those harder days, when I can gain a moment of peace and reflect on the big picture of what I am doing here, I wouldn’t want my life any other way. I want my children with me. I want to teach them. I want to influence them the most while they are so young and impressionable by everything they see and hear. It is truly a privilege and the highest of honors to be give this responsibility and I don’t take it lightly.

This lifestyle affords us much flexibility! Want to go spend a week in the mountains while everyone else is still in the grind of work and school? Yes!!! Dave working from home even makes us more flexible, which made this trip possible. It is a positive thing not to be tied down to a state mandated school schedule! I know what we need to get done and we do it. We’ve done school at Grams and Gramps’ house, right before bed in our pjs and on Saturdays some weeks if we have gotten behind. The flexibility is a blessing. It is nice to be in control of my family’s schedule instead of the school system dictating when we can travel.

I’d say this year we have very much fallen into the homeschool family lifestyle…and I like it! It is a perfect fit for our family and for the direction that we want to take our family.

- Elaine