A New Beginning

It has been five years since I originally played around with the idea of blogging.  It has been an interesting journey as I continue to get to know the ins and outs of my children and how they learn.

As I plan out our goals for this spring and summer, I'm realizing that in just a few months we will be officially homeschooling a high schooler. I feel very unprepared for this daunting task.  My feelings of unpreparedness have nothing to do with academics and everything to do with preparing a teenager to enter adulthood in just four very short years.

I feel like time is ticking away.

My 9th grader has very specific college and career goals.  In a way, this is a blessing.  It is a blessing in that knowing the end goals means I can very easily tailor his high school courses to obtain that goal. But doubts always linger in the back of my mind. Are we doing the right thing? Why did we choose this path? From the very beginning we always said we would homeschool UNTIL high school, not THROUGH high school.

But God has a sense of humor about these things.

With strengths, there are always weaknesses. What better way to address these head on that at home?  Big college goals? Save some money and dual enroll at the local community college. This of course has the added benefit that we're no longer in charge of science labs and higher level maths.  Sheltering my children was never a reason we chose to homeschool, but I watch the news. I know the things we're missing out on.  Fun stuff, sure?  But again - the news tells me that most of what we are missing out isn't a big loss to our family.

Looking at our spring goals, I am looking forward to spending this last little bit of time before high school working on some family projects and unit studies.  In addition to our regular math and writing we will be shifting gears to include more time outdoors for nature study. We will be starting a new poetry book and have a few art projects planned.

Holy Week in general is a busy week for our family, so although we have goals this week we are going to try and be flexible.  I pray this flexibility carries over into this next phase in our homeschooling.