A good, solid beginning to our 7th year of homeschooling

Our seventh year!  It feels so weird to say that.  I remember our first year like it was yesterday.  I remember that feeling of jumping into the unknown.  It was one of the scariest feelings of my life.

Yet here we are...

This first month of homeschool was a really good one.  The last two years have been bumpy, after the adjustments to come with a cross-country move, putting my oldest back in public school last year, and learning how to navigate my daughter's adhd, anxiety, and struggles learning to read and write.  At the end of this summer, after years of resisting and several months of finally realizing--peacefully--that we needed to make some changes, we decided to try medication for her.  I am pleasantly astounded at the positive changes this has made in our homeschooling experience.  I still wish this wasn't the course we had to take, and I'm hoping that it isn't forever, but I am grateful that for now it is working--really well.

My daughter can now focus long enough to want to work, and it feels like a miracle.  All along I've tried to adapt our homeschool environment to meet her needs--giving frequent breaks, making lessons hands-on and active, getting plenty of outdoor time, making lesson content as rich, imaginative, and engaging as possible, and tolerating a great many interruptions as her distractibility took her away and away time and again... then patiently (or sometimes not-so-patiently) redirecting her back into what we were trying to do.  I prided myself on the fact that if she were in public school, she'd have to take medication in order to adapt, but with homeschool, we could adapt to her needs.  And we did.  But it wasn't enough.   Whenever I sought advice from other homeschooling parents, the suggestions generally amounted to "just unschool"... just let her lead the way and do whatever she feels like doing.  But I've never felt like that was the right way.  

My daughter is extremely intelligent, but struggled with reading and writing.  I suspect she has mild to moderate dyslexia and/or dysgraphia, though I haven't pursued testing.  A switch to a dyslexia-friendly reading program, combined with a trip to the eye doctor and a pair of glasses, helped her make great strides in reading the last half of last year.  But being on medication has meant that she now has the ability to concentrate on reading her very first ever chapter book.  In the past, she could never focus long enough to read anything besides picture books, and even then only a few pages.  Now she has been checking out all kinds of books from the library and reading them of her own volition.  

Handwriting--We tried to learn cursive last year; I introduced all the letters... but my daughter had no patience whatsoever for practicing handwriting.  And handwriting is one of those things you can't get better at if you don't practice.  This year she has been proud of trying to do good work in handwriting and has been willing to practice almost every day.  

Even drawing--- Sariah loves to draw, but in the past, she would shut down about halfway through a main lesson drawing.  She would be gung-ho and eager at the beginning, but didn't have the focus to sustain her work in a drawing that took time or required effort.  Any little mistake meant that she would just give up and start scribbling.  But look at these drawings she did of the main gods and goddesses of Norse Mythology, which we studied this month!

Odin, the wise father-god.

Thor, god of thunder.

Loki, the trickster.

Sif, Thor's wife.

Balder, god of light.

Heimdall, protector of the rainbow bridge.

Njord, god of the sea with Freya his daughter, goddess of love.  We also heard about Frey her brother, but Sariah didn't want to draw three people.

Frigg, favorite wife of Odin and goddess of motherhood.

She was able to stick with learning new techniques (how to draw human figures with colored pencils) as well as drawing twice a week for four weeks.  Only on the last two drawings she did, did I see and hear evidence that she was getting tired of drawing and yet, still, she was able to persevere.

So the focus of our month of September was Norse mythology, colored pencil drawing, form drawing, handwriting, and math review.  It seemed like a fairly simple way to ease into the year... but the month still felt extremely busy.

We didn't get to as many forms as I'd planned--I decided that ultimately we needed to spend more of our time on handwriting.  Above are two nice ones that she did.  These are in preparation for the more complex knotted and braided forms she will do for most of the year.

As part of our study of the Norse myths, we learned about runes and woodburned them onto wooden disks.  (We woodburned the English alphabet equivalent onto the back of each disk.)  Sariah really loved this.  On each of her drawings, she wrote the god or goddess's name in runes.  I also found some fun puzzles online with mystery phrases written in runes which she had to solve.

The stories we told this month were introductory stories to give her a taste of who each god or goddess was.  In December and April we will follow up with more stories.

We also started Preston's second year of kindergarten this month.  I have to admit, I've struggled a bit to get kindergarten going smoothly.  Preston is perfectly content to play, and Sariah's academic needs are still so many.  (I'm trying to really work extra hard with her this year, knowing that next year I'll have two main lessons to teach and not as much one-on-one time.)  We're not always doing kindergarten stories and activities every day as I'd hoped.  But he is getting things a few times a week, and honestly, he is happy the way things are.  He spent hours playing outdoors in our wooded backyard during September.  He (with Sariah's help) built a fort of branches up against one of our trees.   He dug up alot of the bricks that lined the edge of our lawn in one area and has been building structures, ramps, bridges and all sorts of things with them.  With Sariah, he went on walks several times a week and did yoga on the other days.  He has quite the patience for yoga.  This is not something I'd necessarily bring to him, but big sister was doing it, and we weren't going to leave him out.  I am really grateful for the Waldorf philosophy and that encouragement to not rush into "school", but to give the child as much time as possible to just play.  One day we asked Preston what he thought about being in first grade next year and having lessons like big sister.  His answer was "Nope.  Not interested."  A non-academic kindergarten is perfect for him.  

Kindergarten in wooded Pennsylvania means discovering snakes in the yard!  We saw two in as many days!