Help
With Your Rule
Outgoing Mom & Homeschooling
Dear Holly:
I am a stay-at-home mother of a four year old and a two year old. My husband and I plan to have more children, and we plan to homeschool. My current dilemma is this: It seems like I need to get out of the house just about every day (library storytimes, trips to the zoo, playdates, etc...), just to keep my sanity. However, I do always schedule one "at home day" each week, but that seems to be all that the children and I can handle. I cannot imagine my future homeschooling life. Am I going out with my children too much? Do I need to schedule more at-home time? My schedule seems to be determined mostly by the outing of the day. Should we try to stay home more, and how would I go about making the switch? Are regular outings for preschoolers beneficial/necessary? Sometimes I wonder who benefits from our outings. Please help!
Labels: Homeschooling
posted by Holly at 1:30 PM
4 Comments:
In the Mystical Body of Christ, there are many parts, and each part is necessary to bring the Body to full health. You are just a certain part of the body and I think you ought to cash in on it. I have a friend who is very much like you - who loves to get out and go - and so does all her chidlren.
I think this is the perfect way for you to analyze both yourself then, and what it means to educate. In fact, I almost envy your temperament - it would be nice to desire to leave home more often! Think of the hands-on experiences your children can have with a little creative planning! Think about the field trips you can do! Wow. Your attention to your children's education , in whatever fresh and outgoing format you can do, is not meant to be limited to staying inside the 4 walls of your home.
As with any temperament, there are draw backs. You might find yourself scheduling your life around these outings, and no, perhaps this isn't the best way to do it - but I think it is still doable... Take your 5 ps. With such a personality, getting to mass would be a welcome relief for your family's daily prayer as they all grow older. What a wonderful thing to look forward to! :-)
I'd start with your 5 ps, as per usual, but when you get to the 4th P Parent, think about what the essence of Catholic Education is, and allow your spontaneous social nature to influence HOW you school your children. There is more to education than a school format - you have the natural impetus to explore this.
I have some essence-of-education posts on my Thoughts for Mom blog page. Sophia Institute Press has a new book coming out very shortly on Catholic Homeschooling (of which I was a small contributor) which can provide MANY ideas - 500 pages worth of ideas! I'll get back shortly as I forgot the title! heh heh
And I also recommend another new Sophia book to you - "The Temperament God Gave You" which might also shed light on your uniqueness. It can be purchased by going to www.sophiainstitute.com (or click on the "order MROL" link on my sidebar - it will take you directly to Sophia)
God Bless
Holly
Hi All!
Forgive my forgetfulness! Yeesh! But the new homeschooling book for Catholic moms that is coming out from Sophia is "The Catholic Homeschool Companion" - over 500 pages of great ideas; about 43 authors (yours truly included) and everything from A-Z
It is due out in a couple of weeks (ie early February 2006). For more info, go to www.sophiainstitute.com in a couple of weeks. I will also be doing a review of it for you when I get my copy and will give details.
God bless
Holly
One of the beauties of homeschooling is precisely that it can be adapted to each family. Your homeschooling schedule can revolve around nature walks in the park, piano lessons, trips to the gym, Mass, museum visits, etc., with book lessons arranged around the outings instead of vice versa.
We have seven children and have been homeschooling for 24 years and our youngest is 12 so it will total 30 years when he is 18! I used to feel like you when our children were small but now we always have plenty to do at home and like to be here.(sewing, art, driveway basketball and pasture baseball, piano, singing, guitar playing, crafts, cooking from scratch-even grinding the flour and helping with 3 at home businesses: our family singing group, a health business and my herb business. We seem to have a community at home (4 kids still at home)and don't need the outside one so much. We are even getting as many as four stay-at-home days per week now but it comes and goes.
When we were tied in with HomeSource mostly for music, tap dancing, tennis, basketball, gymnastics and tons of field trips including Victoria, BC and Seattle (we live in Oregon)over a several year span of time I would only take classes on one or two dcys because it got to be too much.
With the older kids I just had to do everything and never wanted to miss a thing and it was a mistake I learned later. One man described it this way.."We worship the god of opportunity" I would have been better off staying home and developing relationships that went deeper with them. I can see this now that they are adults and raising their own families. With one son, I never even have anything to talk about and he is the same with me...sad. All our older children have made the Faith their own and are good Catholics so I don't have a lot to complain about thank Goodness!
It helped when we recently worked on a family mission statement and started to drop off the things that just kept us from doing that. For example, we had our oldest two daughters in home school band for 4 and 7 years and now with the family singing we need to learn to play guitar, bass, accordion, banjo, mandolin and fiddle. You can't sing with a clarinet or saxiphone in your mouth even if it was wonderful. We even had them in two bands which meant 4 days a week.
The singing group didn't take off until about 5 years ago and it is with the younger children. I'm so glad we had so many because this has been a dream of mine since I was a kid. If we only had 3 children it would not have happened!! My latest motto is- You need a large family to have a 4-part choir!
I hope this is helpful or encouraging and gives you some ideas. I would be glad to "talk" more.
God bless, Leslie Hanson
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