I love homeschooling.
Maybe it’s because I’m a teacher and I just get really excited about
things like curricula and lesson plans.
But there are at least two other, more important reasons.
First, I love getting to see my kids so excited about what
they’re learning. Like when Bryan comes
yelling, “Mommy, come look! Mommy,
come! Look, look, it’s an R! Look, Mommy!
An R!” (R is our current “letter
of the week.”) I love hearing the
connections they make. I love that I actually
knew what Ashlyn was talking about when she found an art set buried in the junk
in her closet and said, “Look, Mama! Could
we use this to make a doric thing?” Mom:
“You mean a doric temple? Like the
Parthenon?” Ashlyn: “Yes, like the Parthenon.
Doesn’t this look doric? I think
it looks doric-ish.” :) Ahhh…such entertainment. :)
(Hmmm…one not very good reason I like homeschooling is my
sense of pride… I am a little too proud,
I think, that my not-quite-4-year-old boy can find Egypt, Greece, and Mt Vesuvius
on the world map -- even if I’m not sure if he can find the United States!)
The other really great reason I love doing homeschool is
seeing the way God arranges my lessons.
It is awesome. I want to tell you
two little examples of how God directs our homeschool. There are so many examples; I’m just going to
tell you the ones from today.
This week (well, two weeks, actually), we’re doing “R is for
Rock” – about David killing Goliath with a rrrrrock, about David rrrrunning from
King Saul to find rrrrefuge in the rrrrocks.
We also talked about Greece, and the original Olympic games (and did our
own rrrrraces). We learned several
awesome memory verses about the Rock, and one about “the games.” Then our history lesson for the second week
was RRRRome! Perfect. :) That whole lesson was a lot of fun, too—but I’ll
try to stick to the point here. I skipped
ahead in our Science books to get to the section about Rocks. But I really never got around to planning
that until today (Friday of the 2nd week…). So this morning, I was trying to figure out what
I’m going to cook for the weekend, what really needs to be cleaned, what school
stuff we should do, etc. I knew most of
my menu, but wasn’t quite sure of the dessert (I promise, this is part of the
point!). I emailed my mother-in-law for
a recipe, but wasn’t sure I’d hear back in time to make it. Then I sat down to look at the Science stuff –
and lo and behold, one of the activities listed is to make “Sedimentary Rock
Cookies.” Perfect again! (It’s actually the “dream bars,” or “Daddy’s
cookies,” or several other names.) A
layer cookie, for layered rocks. Mmmm…homeschool
is yummy, too. ;)
I know it doesn’t seem like a big deal, but I really
appreciate all those little-deal moments, when I see that God directed
something. I needed a dessert and I
needed a science lesson, and I got both, in a delightful, memorable way. I didn’t plan that, but Someone did…
The second thing that worked out just right today was
Spanish. We needed to review the
numbers 1-10. Hmmm…what would be a fun
way to do that… Oh! We’re going outside to do hopscotch (because
you have to rrrroll a rrrrock in that game), so we can just jump around from
number to number and use that as our Spanish class! Perfect!
(And it was so much fun!
Especially when we had to do really big jumps, and especially when the
kids got to be the ones in charge.)
As Loren said tonight, “If you’re paying attention, you can
hear God talking to you. But if you’re
not paying attention, you might not notice.”
I love homeschooling because I love watching God lay out the
lessons in awesome little ways.
