This is my entry in the Home Education Week challange on Principled Discovery.
It was our third year homeschooling and I though I’d found the perfect curriculum. Alas it was not to be! I will not mention what we used because what went wrong is not the fault of the curriculum. Oh no, it is entirely my fault! I take the blame. It was I, and I alone, who fell prey to THE SCHEDULE.
Seriously, it was like a horror movie. Screaming kids, crying mother, hair being torn out. All because I got obsessed with THE SCHEDULE. I was frantic about checking off boxes, I was anxious if I didn’t get all our reading done, I made K listen to The Bronze Bow all the way through even though it made her eyes glaze over. I actually said to her once *I know you don’t like this book but we have to read three chapters tonight because the schedule says so*. I was a woman possessed (by THE SCHEDULE-OK I’ll stop now) and nobody was having any fun.
I did learn something very valuable that year though. Nobody know what is going to work for us but us. A program can be the best in the world to someone else and not right for us or it could be right for us…with some tweaking. Either way being a schedule slave is NOT for me!
This is year 10 for us, and every few years I still feel the need to do something *easy* and all spelled out for me. And every time, I toss it all after a few months.
I’m a slow learner, I guess…