It is the time of year where I beging to think, in a mild panic, about portfolios, especailly the preparation of portfolios. I even begin to dream of portfolios. They dance around mockingly, sort of like derranged sugar plums, beconing me to turn the pages which are either stuck together or blank. Every year I get to the point where I am not sure if we did enough work, learned enough stuff, or did enough school. So even though I have been seeing our progress in the completed work, I get to be concerned about how much is left. We buckle down to finish strong. We find work we set aside to do later for one reason or another. I put together book lists, field trip logs, and video lists. Finish lap books and unit studies. Try to make something managable out of my jumbled log book, which is, um, around here somewhere. I know in my heart and in my head that the best thing to do would be Just Do IT! The whole year I could be all organized. Have all of this started and just add to it as we go. And that is always my attention. I start well. I have binders for the portoflios, and smaller binders for videos, websites, books and a fieldtrip log. I begin to add things as we go. But then, IT happens. Life, school, and the most wonderful thing about the freedom in the life we have choosen- field trips!Most people assume, of course, that when you HOME school you are, well, home. I have even had people make comments about this as though we perhaps store our children somewhere (the closet seems lovely ANY time of year) and pull them out to do school, putting them back when we are "finished" for the day. They don’t go out of the house, don’t play with other kids, don’t know how to act when given the opportunity for freedom. It makes sense on some level. It is right there in the name even. HOMEschool. But that is not the case. (And I can’t get the closet door to stay shut- too many of them in there…)
The biggest problem all my organization runs into is the field trip. We are going along well. Getting work done. Keeping paperwork up-to-date. Then our routine is disturbed by a trip that has been scheduled. We put aside what we are doing to finish on another day. But that other day already has plans for school work or another trip. So it gets pushed further down the list. Things pile up while we are busy living a homeschool life. And so in the spring I find myself trying to find, finish, polish, and even start over on some of these things.
We do 180 days of school work. Plus field trips, which is different from public school in that they count their trips as days. We could, but want to keep learning instead of putting it aside. So we finish. And sometimes even go beyond with a labook, unit study, or by checking out a whole bunch of books or videos to learn more about what we were studying. I know we could be ‘done’ with less work, but we enjoy learning. I will have a kid come find me to log onto a website to find more info, drag a school book after me to hear that one more time, be asked to read a ZooBook yet again, or be asked more questions than I know the answers to about something we are studying. So we look it up together and keep learning.
As for not being around other children, my kids play sports, do dance, are in plays, puppet team, drama team, and go to Good News Club, Sunday School, Children’s Church, Bible Club….. Sometimes we even let them out of the closet to have their frinds come over. And the home part, well, here is a completely incomplete list of the places we have been this school year, not even counting the entire month we spend at the beach. Here goes: Camping, Family Fun Day- twice, Community Days, Fundraisers (that they planned and helped lead), Lakemont, Idlewild, Flight 93 Memorial, MagiQuest (twice), Ripley’s Aquarium, panning for gems and dinosaur bones, boating (twice), fishing at the beach, fishing in PA, craft events (several times), Harvest Parties (2), Game night (many), Co-ops (about 8), Parades, Cantatas they performed in (2), Hershey, Harrisburg, the PA State Capital, The PA State Museum, Batfest at Lincoln Caverns, A Chinese New Year Party, plays, the Science Center, movies, parks, hiking, geocaching, train watching, more than one library, and several friends houses. And there are more to come. If only we STAYED home once in a while, perhaps I could get the house clean…
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