Homeschool

We have had an interesting start at our homeschooling adventure. There are so many things I love about it and so many reasons I try to remind myself that I love when there are days that I don't particularly love it. Truth be told, it is tough for me and I am struggling daily with the battle in my mind about so many different things. I'll stay away from all the confusion that fills my brain and just move on to the fun things we have actually done this year...

Ezra is in Kindergarten. While I am still learning what that means for him, we are exploring the things that he wants to learn. I have no doubt that he is learning a lot this year even on days that my efforts are lacking and I am grateful for that. He is fascinated by so much.

Because there are two other children floating around the house and a sometimes very sick mommy, we have to be flexible with how things are structured... I have recently changed our schedule to have a daily focus subject. We will cover other subjects, but spend most of our time on just one for the day. Thursday is strictly our science day. Ezra's favorite day of the week by far! Friday is generally a craft day/make-up day/occasional field trip day.

He is reading books by himself now and is doing so great at figuring out tricky words. He even reads entire versus of the scriptures mostly by himself and he gets so much pride from that. It is making all those incredibly stressful reading lessons so worth it.

We have had some fun units such as: dinosaurs, jellyfish, volcanoes, geysers, gravity, and hearts. We have also had some not so exciting, but still educational units. Thank goodness for pinterest or most of our lessons would be not so exciting. It's fun when I get a little creative all on my own, but that's rare.

We have also started attending a monthly homeschooling class at the aquarium lab. They get to learn about creatures and they bring in a special guest for them to discover. It's a fun change for Ez to be in a somewhat standard class setting once in awhile.

Makai got to participate a little as well which was fun. Ez is in the striped shirt. He's sitting next to his buddy Haley. We do a co-op fairly regularly with her and they have a great time together. We do experiments, crafts and the even helped each other learn to tell time. It's so fun. He did so well in this class and is such a well behaved child. I had no doubt he would be, but it was fun to see what he is like when mommy isn't in charge.

Ez at the Aquarium before heading to his class. 

All in all, I don't regret my decision to homeschool him. Do I think I'll do it next year? I'm still torn. I have two (almost three) other babies that need my attention and I'm not sure I'm the type of supermom that can divide myself equally. I feel like I'm giving up if I put him in public school, but I also feel like I might be holding him back if I don't. Ugh... It really is the toughest decision to me because I feel so passionately for homeschooling... I guess we'll see what happens. If we lived in a different area I think my heart wouldn't be in such turmoil about it.

For now though we still have some time and some fun ahead of us. I plan to continue schooling throughout the summer (if pregnancy and baby #4 allow me to), so I'll try to be better about tracking our progress and adventures.