Reaching Higher
Homeschool News
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Your Bucket of Learning
Last month we offered some advice and strategy for getting back on track with homeschooling, when you have veered off from your meticulously laid plans.
We suggested identifying the stressors, pinpointing irritations and creating time to deal with the ‘issues’.
These are all good strategies, but there is also a reality to face:
Life seldom goes as smoothly as all our well-laid plans.
There are always ‘curve-balls’, unplanned interruptions and distractions that can hi-jack even the best-planned homeschool day.
Sometimes, the interruption can be ongoing, such as the renovations Wendy has recently been living through, others are more short-term, such as sudden relationship crises, illnesses, unexpected guests etc.
When we are robbed of the time we intended to spend accomplishing school work or other learning activities, we can either
- spring into catch-up mode and sacrifice our leisure time to get the work done,
- we can take a deep breath and resolve to simply take longer to reach our goals, or
- we can scrap some of our plans and go on with the rest.
If you are following a rigidly structured school curriculum with dates and deadlines, you will probably spend a lot of time stressing yourself and your children working in catch-up mode.
If you are the master of your own curriculum, then you will have more freedom and can choose the second or third option above.
You could keep Fridays as a 'lite' school day to allow for making up for interruptions to your week and set a mid-term catch up week to help you get back on track after inevitable deviations from your planned term's work.
Remember too, that there are often valuable life lessons for our children to learn from those uplanned interruptions, such has how to care for a sick family member, how to support a friend through a crisis, how to deal with a washing machine that suddenly overflows or a how to help a neighbour whose car has broken down. This is life and these are life skills that no book could teach our children!
The following quote always comforts us and helps to put things in perspective:
Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire.
~ William Butler Yeats
Our buckets are probably never as full as we planned for them to be, but if the fire, that love of learning is lit, we have already succeeded and we can continue to steer our children towards the goal of becoming independent, life-long learners.
Where is your focus?
Are you stressing and straining to keep up with the demands of a curriculum and busily filling that bucket or are you taking a deep breath, letting the stress go and fanning the flames?
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Cape Town Homeschool Expo
Date: Saturday, 31 AUGUST 2013
Time: 10h00-16h00
Venue: Civic Centre, Voortrekker Road, Belville
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Don’t Be Overwhelmed at Homeschool Expos
From September to November each year its South African homeschool curriculum expo season!
Homeschool expos are held in various
cities around South Africa: Cape Town, Durban, George and Johannesburg
being the regular annual events.
It can be quite overwhelming to attend a
homeschool expo, especially the first time and especially if you are a
new homeschooler!
You walk into a hall that is filled with tables of educational goods and you don’t know where to start.
There is so much stuff, how do you choose what your family needs?
How do you avoid impulse shopping and buying a lot of neat goodies that you actually don’t need?
Don’t be overwhelmed at expos but use
these homeschool expo tips from seasoned homeschool moms to avoid making
impulse decisions that you might regret.
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| Homeschooling Research Shows that Home Education Works
- and produces well-educated learners who become successful and socially responsible citizens as adults. Click the button below to read more.
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