First Hints Your Homeschool Plan Isn’t Working

• Mom is stressed, non enjoying homeschool, dreading doing school each day.
• Kids are listless, and not wholeheartedly diving into the lessons.
• The kids keep asking, “Can we do something else?” and the mom says “No, we don’t have time because we’ll fall behind on what we HAVE to do.
• Homeschool is no longer fun and interesting.

Clearly, when homeschool is no longer a delight but drudgery, it’s time to mix things up.

First, analyze what things DO work!

There is no reason to fix what’s not broken, right????

Teaching Textbooks is really working for us this year. Both girls are doing it now, and doing well.

Life of Fred is awesome. We love it in this house, and do it three times per week.

Our Math Fact Songs daily are working great, along with our Math Wrap-Ups. The girls are really getting their math facts drilled into their heads. So far, we are covering addition, subtraction, and multiplication. Division will be added sometime in the Spring.

SpellingCity.com is sorta working. It works when the girls decide to be slightly interested in spelling at all. Right now they just don’t care. I’m still working on that.

The grammar lessons that I am putting together are working. They are a ton of work to find and organize all of the resources I’m using, but the girls are truly learning and learning the grammar well. As long as I stay on top of it, which is always an issue!

Learning Action Verbs by Creating an Action Verb Path!

Playing Pronoun Games (from Scholastic Teacher’s Express)

Other things that are working: Homeschool Co-Op. I’m not completely thrilled about Co-Op, honestly. Frankly, it’s a really long drive, I was assigned one too many classes to assist in, and I go home completely exhausted each week. BUT, the girls love it. They are getting really good classes there – Spanish, science, PE, art, etc. So, we’re going to keep with it for another semester. Ballet is also working for us. The girls love to dance.

And then we had some random things we did that they liked. Here is one of us trying a science experiment I saw on Facebook – a “dancing raisins” experiment:

Ask The Kids!

At this point, we asked the kids, “What do you like about what we’re learning?” “What do you like about what we’re doing right now?” The only thing mentioned from the MFW Exploring Countries and Cultures curriculum were the missionary biographies. Notably, nothing else was mentioned.

Then we asked them, “What would you want to learn about?” “What do you want to study?”

I know, it’s not rocket science, right? Up until this year, they were so happy just to learn, they really didn’t care what. This year, they are starting to have opinions. Strong ones.

First, of all, they wanted MORE science. “Real Science,” as my youngest put it. Lots more science. I started to ask what kind of science, and they even had thoughts about that – they want to learn about how the body works, and about nutrition. More reading of real books. More “real art” (again, from my 6-year-old) not silly craft projects. More focus on girls (more about that later). And holy heck, they want even more math. !!! Are they kidding me???

Clearly, this was a conversation that was long in coming.

Stay Tuned for Part 3 of this series, Mid-Year Change of Plans!

So, this year in the My Father’s World plan, we are supposed to do the “Exploring Countries and Cultures” year.

What I Like About This Curriculum:

• It’s based on the family group learning together, which I’m a huge fan of.
• It focuses on World Geography.
• Also focuses on the biographies of missionaries and missionary work around the world. We have LOVED these stories, and I think this is a unique and novel approach.

Worksheets on Our Backyard Habitat.

What I Dislike About This Curriculum

• Just about everything else.

I have fought it, and fought it and fought it. I love My Father’s World, the company, the concept and the organization of it. It’s been absolutely perfect for us, until now.  I thought it was just me, but my girls started acting un-enthused for school. I thought I was going crazy, until I saw others also mention it on Facebook. It feels disjointed and choppy, my girls hate the science portion and think it’s lame. And the worksheets (country pages) just feel like worksheets for worksheets sake. We have spent the last few months going through the motions forcing this down our throats AND IT IS NOT WORKING.

Which of course started my entire freakout!

I always swore I would NOT be one of those homeschool moms. I was going to do my mountains and mountains and mountains of research in advance and be sure of everything I’m using before I buy it. (Yeah, I know. I can here you guys laughing all the way from here!)

Absolutely nothing this year has worked according to my plan. My old way of doing homeschool up to this point, DID NOT WORK NOW. And frankly, I don’t know how to homeschool (for me!) any other way than what I was doing! All my grand designs were going up in smoke.

Hubby was willing to do whatever I said we needed to do. And isn’t that frustrating, when he isn’t willing to be the bad guy? LOL

I timidly mentioned to him that our homeschool plan wasn’t working. That it felt choppy and disjointed and uncomfortable. Even those online who say they liked this year’s program admitted to heavily supplementing it. I felt discombobulated and disorganized and completely outta control.

I said this timidly, because I knew what this was going to mean. This was going to mean spending money.

But, when I told him that I needed to change things up, I think he felt relieved. He wants homeschooling to work for us, he wants for his wife to not be stressing about homeschool so much, he wants to come home to a wife and kids who are excited about what they are learning every day.

His “permission” to change, gave me the opening I needed to be willing to put this curriculum down and find another way to do school.

Stay Tuned for Part 2 of this series, Mid-Year Change of Plans!