Gearing up to homeschooling ... Year One

Sorry I've been so quiet.

Mark is doing extremely well. He is healing well and was able to move from the general care floor up to physical therapy today. He is sounding as cheerful as I have heard him sounds in a very long time. I know he's still in pain, but I suspect that the relief that this isn't playing out as a repeat of last winter must be even more of a relief to him than it is for us. Rod is still staying over there with Matt when I'm not at work, and that seems to be working out better for everyone.

Jack is happier about his routine not being so different, now that I am home to spend the evenings with him, as I always do, though he is still very clingy with me and extremely disconcerted to wake up before Rod gets home in the morning. He is also somewhat disconcerted to have reached a height and weight that makes it very, very hard for us to pick him up in a family hug like we used to do. (And as hungry as he's been in the last few days, I think he'll be taller still very shortly.)

Our curriculum is still morphing, but it's getting ever closer to final. The latest big changes are that the more Rod and I have talked about how to work homeschooling into the boys days, the more I have come to feel that it is about covering material thoroughly, not about running races. I have written up the curriculum several times with variants that are intended to address Rod's concerns. Each time I do, I am more satisfied with it.

I think I mentioned a while ago that that we had decided to get away from the whole "scheduling" thing, so I started to rewrite the curriculum in "units" of supporting and progressign materials that could be finished in a month or six weeks -- or could stretch out longer, depending on what was happening.

Once I removed the time limits, I found that there was room for more depth, and so I added a bit more material from here and there.

Then I cam across a book that, while not exactly a "living book" does approach history in the same way we do. It starts history with the big bang...so I am thinking about making that the "core" of our history curriculum. The catch is that there are 70 pages before we get to the Paleolithic, where I had intended to start and around which I had based Unit 1. When Rod mentioned being concerned about how to schedule everything, I started to consider whether we might want to start more slowly. Eventually I renamed Unit 1 and created a new "jump off point" in which the boys will read a couple of stories, but will mostly discuss what history is and recap the history of the world up to the Paleolithic, which Jack is pretty familiar with. They can use the recap to put some icons on the very early timeline and put it all into perspective, but there is far less material to cover and most of it is pretty familiar, so if they want to skip over some things, or speed through them it will be fine. That will give them someplace to start more slowly, and later they can add all the other subjects.

Once we start adding subjects, Rod will let me know which books really work for them and which don't, so we can refine things further and move faster through what remains.

My big regret is that all of this sounds like so much fun that I wish I could play, too!