Shirley's Story

“Is there anyone that fails
Is there anyone that falls
Am I the only one in church [homeschooling] today feelin' so small

Cause when I take a look around
Everybody seems so strong
I know they'll soon discover
That I don't belong

So I tuck it all away, like everything's okay
If I make them all believe it, maybe I'll believe it too
So with a painted grin, I play the part again
So everyone will see me the way that I see them
Are we happy plastic people
Under shiny plastic steeples
With walls around our weakness
And smiles to hide our pain
But if the invitation's open
To every heart that has been broken
Maybe then we close the curtain
On our stained glass masquerade

The second last stanza says:

“But would it set me free
If I dared to let you see
The truth behind the person
That you imagine me to be”…

When Wendy asked me to share about a day in our homeschool, I said I would, but that it will probably tarnish my shiny, plastic image if I told others what is really happening in our home.

You see, I have this idea that REAL good homeschoolers look like this – they rise early, have family devotions, do chores so their home is immaculate, bake homemade bread, eat homegrown vegetables, study the best curriculums with all the optional extras, minister to other homeschoolers, and have bright, hard-working kids with superb attitudes, at the very least.

I have been homeschooling since mid-1997 and lately I have become a homeschooling curriculum supplier and I also host a website about homeschooling, so you might expect that by now, I am really super-organised and efficient and that we have it all together.

In reality, I am only a little more organized than I used to be and probably just as efficient. All that has changed is that I am more experienced and more confident than I used to be all those years ago. ..and I now know that things change as different seasons of our homeschooling lives pass.

Most of the time, in our home, we don’t match many of those criteria described above!

At the moment, I have 5 children, aged 9 and under and a new baby, now 4 months old. (In 1997 I started homeschooling my step-daugther, now 15 and now living with her mom.).

I am not block-ticker/schedule/roster/time-table kind of person, although I do try and loosely follow the schedule of the core curriculum programme we follow. I recently dropped some of the extra subjects we were doing, as we are just not getting as much school work done as we did earlier this year, before my baby was born!

So, this is how our day goes.

I am usually the first to get up at about 8 am (yes, ONLY at 8am!) – sometimes my small kiddies creep into my bed earlier for a quick cuddle. Then I wake the two that are of school-going age, 9 and 7. While they dress, tidy rooms, eat cereal and do chores, I check emails, do my chores, get laundry in the machine, change my baby, make coffee for my husband and attend to any admin that my work-from-husband needs to be done – letters, calls, faxes etc. Some days, this delays the start of “school” a lot!

We used to start school at 9 am, but somehow we generally only get going at 10 am nowadays. I make sure the children do their language arts and maths assignments each day as well as our Bible reading, Bible memory verse and copywork (which is the Bible verse again). Then, IF there are no further interruptions, we do our history read alouds and other reading for the day. This doesn’t seem to happen every day, so on some days, we have to catch up, even though I skip some of the required reading from our course as well.

We have lunch (always sandwiches) at about 12 or 12:30 and then tidy up and get ready for any activities in the afternoons. We only have a few – both older children do piano on a Monday, Lucy (9) does gymnastics on Tues and Thursdays and ballet, the 3 older ones have art on a Wednesday for an hour.

After that they either play, read or ride bikes outside (often with neighbourhood friends - we live on a very quiet street). In the afternoons I do errands, get work done on my website and home business or reply to emails while I chat on skype with a homeschooling friend – most often!

We have supper sometime between 6 and 7, then the children bath and get ready for bed. Bedtime is supposed to be at 8:30 in our home, but the older two children are usually only settled by 9 pm…and while I then work at my computer, they sometimes sneak in some extra bedtime reading, which is why they wake so late in the mornings!

As much as I have tried to reform this bedtime and wake up time routine to comply with what I imagine to be a more preferable timetable, this seems to be the default that we fall into most of the time, especially in summer when it is light until 8 pm here.

So, if I judge myself by the “shiny, plastic” standards of what I think is the IDEAL homeschool family – we fall far short…BUT when I see how my children love reading, how nicely they interact with each other and other children (most of the time) when I receive compliments about how polite they are and I see that they are growing in faith and in character (even though we also have struggles), then I know that I am succeeding and that my shiny, plastic ideals are probably not practical – well, not for us in our current circumstances anyway!

..and my hope is that the truth of what happens in our home, will set others free from tryng to live up to a false, shiny, plastic image of what a homeschooling family is!

	Web www.homeschool-curriculum-for-life.com