School's Out!

We have finished schooling for another year!

We began the year with gusto, as we usually do. Shortly after, we slowed to a crawl, as we usually do. Then we moved, and school wasn’t just on the back burner, I completely took it off the stove. I am so grateful for the flexibility of home education, which allows me to do that. While we dealt with the transition of moving we could take a break and no one suffered because of it.

However, we did reach a point where I realized we really needed to buckle down and get some work done before the end of the year was upon us. I am so proud of my big boys, they worked so hard for the past few months. I made a schedule for each of them to complete, with June 12 as our target end date. They were both done yesterday, and today we finished our year-end testing!

Generally, home educators are required to submit a portfolio of work and summative record at the end of the year. The division we were registered with in the fall, before our move, allows that year end reporting to be replaced by standardized testing. I have found these tests to be a great tool in seeing where my kids have strengths and areas for growth, so that’s the route we went this year. I’ll drop them off on Friday, but as far as I am concerned, we are done!

Now’s when I get really excited about homeschooling. The summer months are when I dream about all the things I can improve, all the fun things we’ll do, all the books we’ll read, and I don’t have to deal with enforcing anything. I just dream of reading captivating books and having a couch lined with good listeners who beg for another chapter. I dream of going exploring and there are no kids complaining about bugs, temperature, or wind. (I am working on having them understand that these forces of nature are completely out of my control but they can take it up with the God who can do something about it.) I somehow convince myself that my curricula choices will finally be the perfect ones that make homeschooling easy.

Reality will set in soon enough when the leaves start to fall, but for now I will live in my summer dream world.

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