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folklaur
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| Posted: March 26 2009 at 6:25pm | IP Logged
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So, being as I am so far past "stressed" it isn't even funny, I have been amusing myself by looking at homeschool curriculum, since I am a curriculum junkie and just looking at all the possibilies is just way fun. Usually.
I have come to the conclusion, however, that I want to do it ALL, and there is just not enough time to do so!
I love Oak Meadow! And the Serendipity Plans! Oh, and Sonlight! And WinterPromise! HomeschoolShare! So many options at CurrClick! I love the Freedom of Unschooling! Yet I like the discipline and simplicity of Seton!
ETC!!!!
I need more kids to homeschool.....
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Maryan
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| Posted: March 26 2009 at 6:54pm | IP Logged
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 Wait... you didn't even mention Montessori, Mother of Divine Grace, Mater Amabilis,...
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Maryan
Mom to 6 boys & 1 girl: JP('01), B ('03), M('05), L('06), Ph ('08), M ('10), James born 5/1/12
A Lee in the Woudes
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Lara Sauer
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| Posted: March 26 2009 at 8:39pm | IP Logged
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I might have a few to lend you for awhile...do you take boarders...and do you pay airfare? 
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You can take the girl out of Wisconsin, but you can't take the Wisconsin out of the girl!
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Lisbet
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| Posted: March 27 2009 at 7:38am | IP Logged
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Seton is NOT simple!! LOL!! I've struggled more since starting Seton with my oldest (struggle with guilt mostly, that it's not the best way to learn!) than I did all the years of unschooling him... I can't accept that it does seem to be the best for this particular child - I don't like it!
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Lisa, wife to Tony,
Mama to:
Nick, 17
Abby, 15
Gabe, 13
Isaac, 11
Mary, 10
Sam, 9
Henry, 7
Molly, 6
Mark, 5
Greta, 3
Cecilia born 10.29.10
Josephine born 6.11.12
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Bookswithtea
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| Posted: March 27 2009 at 3:18pm | IP Logged
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Lisbet wrote:
| I can't accept that it does seem to be the best for this particular child - I don't like it! |
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Lisbet, you have my heartfelt empathy. This is exactly how I have felt with my 15 yr old's school this year. He likes it, I hate it. And I agree, there is nothing *simple* about it! 
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~Books
mothering ds'93 dd'97 dd'99 dd'02 ds'05 ds'07 and  due 9/10
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Martha
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| Posted: March 27 2009 at 3:35pm | IP Logged
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me too! I want to fully enroll in Seton, plus use Kolbe's religion, history, science, and literature, didache and or Epic. Life of Fred algebra.
all for 9th grade.
I do have more kids to home school and the list for each of them is just as long and impossible.
I do think seton is simple, but it's not for everyone. Even though I like them, I still find some areas that I don't like or do that don't work for us. Namely science and math. 
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Martha
mama to 7 boys & 4 girls
Yes, they're all ours!
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folklaur
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| Posted: March 28 2009 at 12:56am | IP Logged
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Lisbet wrote:
| Seton is NOT simple!! LOL!! |
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Bookswithtea wrote:
| And I agree, there is nothing *simple* about it! |
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whoops sorry! I didn't mean simple as in "easy." I meant simple, as in, the year we tried Seton, they sent me a nice sized box(but not like Sonlights hige box) and it was filled with all-laid-out daily lesson plans, and a pile of workbooks and textbooks and it was all there, all self-contained, and all laid out for me, no planning on my part really needed at all.
So. That is what I meant by simple. I didn't think the work was simple.
Seton made us cry  .
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Sarah
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| Posted: March 28 2009 at 11:06am | IP Logged
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We are only doing 4 Seton courses this year and I am really feeling a crunch. . .I'm not going to do this to us next year. We will probably only do math. Seton is a wonderful organization, but I cannot even imagine doing the entire curriculum with all kids. Wow!
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Six boys ages 16, 14, 11, 7, 5, 2 and one girl age 9
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Willa
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| Posted: March 28 2009 at 11:33am | IP Logged
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cactus mouse wrote:
| I have come to the conclusion, however, that I want to do it ALL, and there is just not enough time to do so! |
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I know what you mean! Anyway, that's a good survivor trait, that you are still so enthusiastic after already homeschooling for the long term!
By simplicity and Seton you probably mean that it's all laid out and mostly good quality workbooks and texts you can keep in a box. right? That's one of the things that handicaps me personally with "real learning" -- the need to juggle all sorts of resources.
No real help but since you're mostly looking at entire curriculums, maybe you could just try "SL for a year" or "Serendipity for a year" or whatever you think is the most suited to your family's situation. I went with SL one year and I did learn that it wasn't for my family : ) but that I loved the literature approach.
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AMDG
Willa
hsing boys ages 11, 14, almost 18 (+ 4 homeschool grads ages 20 to 27)
Take Up and Read
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Lisbet
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| Posted: March 30 2009 at 5:33am | IP Logged
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Laura - I knew whatcha ment! ~Then do it all for ya and then ya cry!
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Lisa, wife to Tony,
Mama to:
Nick, 17
Abby, 15
Gabe, 13
Isaac, 11
Mary, 10
Sam, 9
Henry, 7
Molly, 6
Mark, 5
Greta, 3
Cecilia born 10.29.10
Josephine born 6.11.12
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Nedra in So. CA
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| Posted: March 30 2009 at 10:13am | IP Logged
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n/a
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ALmom
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| Posted: March 31 2009 at 5:35pm | IP Logged
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Cactus Mouse:
Have you been peeking in at my planning over the past several years  . I definitely am in the do it all category and I wholeheartedly believe that I would have been happiest being a professional, permanent student - so God gave me a husband to keep me reasonable and a bunch of children so I could be that permanent student - provided I paid attention to his very carefully picked husband who keeps me from driving everyone else insane - BUT only if I listen to him.
Since you are stressed, there are bound to be practical considerations that place limits on what is really possible. I loved Seton's plans in the sense that they were very detailed, full of reminders of immportant things to cover, Catholic (no need to read something first so I had an idea of what had to be addressed, etc., and had some sort of sequential grounding but I could not stand the year we enrolled - nor could my child. My children requested structure and clear communications about what was expected (ie this is what constitutes a full course and being done cause they had many, many nonacademic goals that they wanted time to pursue). They hated someone giving them the opening sentence for a paragraph or seeming to tell them how to think or what to think. (All those years of working to create the ability to think for themselves and whatever combination of personalities and local circumstances combined to set them up for real conflict with Seton - though they had no trouble making the grade). Okay, so we learned some things about what we needed. I loved having someone else review papers - but I wanted a little different kind of feedback. I found that my children benefitted - motivationally and also just having a different view - by having someone else comment on their papers. Perhaps writing is one of those areas where if I'm the only one reviewing the work, they learn all I know including all my holes. Having someone else guide the writing means, in all liklihood, they'll find someone with a different set of holes. I didn't feel like Seton gave us exactly the kind of feedback we wanted. They had to be more concerned about the grade and not letting go of the "master" so they could re-use the same assignments. We also did not have the same evaluator for the papers so there wasn't always the consistency to help us learn. (I think that has changed now) That left us somewhat frustrated not quite knowing how to improve (even if it was simply trying to figure out how to go from the 99 to the 100). I wanted something where it was more like a professional editing, demonstration - with or without grades was fine.
I felt stifled (and so did the dc) by being confined to texts and workbooks, though I didn't mind using them from time to time or for overviews or for a gee, we just have to get the bare minimum here cause you're avoiding this entirely - until we can find a better way of doing it or find someone who knows it well enough to teach it to your learning style (think science here).
I didn't like the rut of checking off boxes - doesn't have to be that way with workbooks, but it can become that way if mom is scatterbrained and such. I'd have great ideas when I first looked at whatever material, but by the time we were in the nitty gritty of schooling, I couldn't remember what I told a child 5 minutes before, yet alone any of those creative ideas about the additional books to read that would make this come alive. I also hated getting bogged down on someone else's timetable. If I felt the dc needed more time, I didn't want us to feel like we were behind or had to rush through something they liked (because they're generally good at the stuff they like) just to get done. I can be quite stubborn so this was a trap that was easy for me to fall into at first (definitly one we fell into the year we did Seton). I found myself just wanting to be done, so I know the children were at it much sooner, but I despised that that fostered less care for what was really understood and finding all kinds of shortcuts to learn the material to be tested. My big mantra has always been "but do you really understand it."
My children wanted something that laid out a plan for each day with all the subjects. They, otherwise, tend to get sidetracked on their one passion to the neglect of all else. These children even requested this so it isn't just me not letting them learn naturally. They did - just they noticed the same thing that I did - namely that they simply avoided certain things.
Anyways, I love planning because I just bristle when things do not fit and the stress is worse, but I also didn't want to spend all my time (limited it was, too) planning and not being with the children. I felt my youngers suffered if I was having to do too much with the olders - but there are times when olders simply have to have the support.
The best thing we ever did was have a big family pow wow (mom, dad and one child at a time) to ask the children what they did and did not like about every single school year up to that point. We gained some interesting insights and made notes of what worked and did not work for each child. Then dh and I set aside several different days discussing things like:
What I felt overwhelmed by (science was a biggy)
Where I felt I was failing the children or where I felt things were out of balance. I had to get this out and have dh hear me out on this cause I felt like he naively thought I was grand without knowing all the holes I saw.
The little things I'd noticed through the year like this child seems to respond to xyz and I think they would do very well with .... ie one child seemed to learn by building so if they could make models of historical battles, buildings, weapons, whatever, then they'd learn history better than reading it from a book. Another child seemed to gravitate to reading and seemed to learn tons doing nothing but reading. Another child needed lots of freedom to be up and outside. One child hated science but had spent a part of her younger years researching the bone structure of some animals so she could build accurate models with playdough - it was much more fun to pretend to hunt and dress the animal if it actually had insides. Now I was in no way opposed to counting this as science - just had to see it happen so I could note it and have some plan to know what to strew or introduce and an orderly and not haphazard way of doing this. This child stopped doing the thing entirely if she were required to do any record keeping - just took the joy out of it. Still I had to have some sort of accountability for the state. Waiting for things to happen too often resulted in horrible holes - so I much preferred a plan to follow but flexibility to follow a trail if some odd passion like making playdough animals with accurate insides took over. I didn't want the plans to consume so much of the day, that the children didn't have their own time to do this kind of stuff - then I could sneakily count it later if I wanted to or simply adjust for added time without letting on if that was the better way for a given child.
Then I realistically told my husband my fears about their best learning modes (none of which were mine). I don't know the first thing about projects so I have to have things that are available - experiments, projects, but have the explanations needed or the instructions or a picture so that the particular child would be able to run with it pretty independently. Books, now I'm cool with that and dh knows I'd break the budget if given free reign here so I really needed him to help me figure out and prioritize early. Not being familiar with projects, my tendency would be to order them all, jump on the latest bandwagon and have it around so it would be there if they needed it. If I had free reign, I'd order every book that anyone ever told me was good. And since discovering my dc are very visual/kinesthetic, I'm all for increasing our video library with things of true value. All the children were so very different in what they needed to learn best, resources are limited, I wanted to do it all and floundered when it came to prioritizing. I just could not make a decision.
I also felt I needed help with lessons. I just didn't want to create everything from scratch - but I am a word person, needing and thriving on a very academic model (which all of my dc so far, hate). I am a ponderer so it isn't like I wouldn't sort through all this stuff and tailor it - I just needed to feel the flexibility to do that. So how do you support a very detail oriented, word learner teaching kinesthetics who want as few words as possible. I'm probably dealing with the biggest mismatch of learning styles ever - but God somehow knew what he was doing so I know there is a way. It is very humbling to recognize that I have to get outside support to make this homeschooling work - even if it comes packaged as learning kits from Homeschool science with an occasional gift from talented science moms who work with my children. We have learned many non-academic lessons in the process such as striving for understanding, listening carefully, communicating (and figuring out how to do it for the particular person's personality and learning style) and assuming the best in each as we strive to make it to heaven. I've learned a great deal of humility and had to give up many preconceived notions. These children of ours stretch us to the limits at times and the stretching well it isn't always fun for me, but in the end I am so enriched by it that I wouldn't want it any other way.
My dh was fantastic in asking me just the right questions. We were able to prioritize and decide what were the most critical needs for each child - and also the areas of greatest passion so that we would have resources for them to freewheel a bit in their passion area. He sent me on a research mission to find out what each provider would and would not do and how each thing that was so enticing helped us toward our most critical goals - or what it was that I thought it would provide. He helped prioritize, set a budget, throw in areas that he felt needed doing or areas where he could help - not active teaching. He did go through all the science kits I had on my wish list and tell me which ones were a waste of money cause he could put it together much easier. He is a great hands on type of science guy in terms of his area of greater expertise (electrical, physics, acoustics, light, etc). Neither of us are all that great at the biology or chemistry areas - beyond the bare bones. He had a few ideas of his own, but a realistic knowledge that he cannot do regular teaching - too many business trips, overtime, etc. but he could field questions, set up demonstrations if he knew the topics, that kind of thing. He finally had a more realistic idea of how I just was really failing the children in science. He even expanded the budget a bit to allow for some areas, like the Montessori materials, that he felt would really help us over some humps with some of our children's vision and other issues. He always looks over my lesson plans when they are written (and suggested that we put them on the computer so I don't have to keep inventing the wheel - something dd started to help us do last year). Now, when he looks over plans, he always helps me see that they are a bit (really a lot but he is very polite)unrealistic and helps by asking questions so we pare things down to the doable.
I discovered that one of the most stressful things for me was having my lists of wants and feeling like they were just being rubber stamped (when in reality dh just wanted me to have every tool I needed) and then feeling the money stress crunch. I think some of that came from me having to talk and talk to figure out what it is I've been noticing, etc. and to be able to come to some idea of what might help whereas dh is big picture like the dc and doesn't speak, generally, till he has thought it all out and then speaks in as few words as possible. Discovering this helps us both know where the other is coming from and work together to have a good plan that works for our family - also dh helps me see often when something I think is great is just not suited to a child - they'll get lost in the words but it might help me as a quick reference . I wanted help in staying within a budget and not wasting the hard earned wages on nice to haves but don't really need stuff. When you are stressed and something isn't working, it just seems like everything presents itself as a great solution that will eliminate all this work. The reality is that homeschooling is just plain hard work and while it shouldn't be misery, it will be like everything else this side of heaven - having its crosses and joys and consolations. I knew we needed something - just couldn't figure out what by myself exactly what would be the best investment. Dh was the person God intended to lead in that whole discernment thing and when I actually asked him for help - things really improved.
Here we are approaching the end of the year and I'm still saying we had the best year ever. We still tweaked, had our stressful, tear filled days agonizing over science. We came one more step closer to realizing how much that one subject was ovewhelming my time, energy and that of the children. God provided wonderfully in the generous tutoring of two great moms. I'm driving more but everyone is happier. We'll be wondering what to do next year if we no longer have tutors but we'll see.
I still want to buy it all and think about all the wonderful things out there. I'm looking forward to the planning for next year, but know dh will help me figure out which things are really needed.
In the end, for this year, and probably on into the years to come, I'll continue to do my own planning using a hodgepodge from a lot of different places. My reading lists I start with come from MODG, Kolbe and Seton plus recommendations here and are narrowed down based on the areas or time periods we are focusing on or some particular developing passion or an area we want to stimulate. I utilize some courses from time to time from Seton and love their art videos. I use Kolbe primarily to have some sort of sequence for science and most importantly for the EES where they will look at whatever I have assigned. Since I have the plans from these places, I use them as a starting point - but I also use RC history, Materabilis, and any other plans I already have sitting here.
I though I'd never do a reading course with Seton, but we have found that this helped us through this year with one child. It has kept him on target doing something - the accountability thing really helped him. We won't do it again, probably, with this child. He made it over the hump and now we'll go back to reading and writing.
I have not gone for the Protestant based programs for the most part because I find it too hard to Catholicize just with my limited time. I'd rather spend my planning time thinking how to tailor something to my children's unique styles and adding in or modifying how we do something but I do follow threads here on these things for book recommendations or free projects or ideas on activities to go along with a book so in a way we are doing it all, right?
I don't try to add in all the things at once. We tackled science this year. Now that we're getting a handle on that this year, we'll focus on another area of neglect next year. I can already see where some leanings are - art supplies, opportunities to compete athletically, some group/leadership developing things that take advantage of very hands on learning like boy scouts or something for the boys. I know we need to get more into poetry and poetry memorization. I also want to do a lot more with the liturgical year. As I begin to ponder it all, I know my list will grow a mile long and dh will pare it down to 2 or 3 things we are going to really focus on this coming year. It will come together.
Of course, our wonderfully nutty, never to be predicted children have shown us a few more unknown depths - like the dd who is looking into being a combat medic (totally outside my realm of comfort and bringing out my own biases. I'm trying to be open to what it is about this that attracts her - of course this past year she was going into theater)who hated science and now loves it as long as it is connected to real life.
Janet
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TxTrish
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| Posted: April 01 2009 at 6:21am | IP Logged
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3 of my children share the same Godmother. Every year when we are discussing our homeschool plans for the next year she asks me what I am doing for history (my biggest offender). Then she yells at me: "You are not making my children do 3 history programs and all those books!" Then, religion, literature, science, art/music and so on. She just keeps yelling at me
You'd think I'd learn, right?
Nah, year after year it ALL looks so good!
I am just happy I have a largish family. I am praying for lots and lots of grandchildren! Or a small dame school when I finish with all mine, maybe, hmmmmm.
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4Real Forums : Living Learning
Topic: I want to do it all!!!!!
