We first homeschooled Reagan and Cade when they were tiny. We took a break for several years and then tried again with all three boys and a little Liberty. Now, thanks to the Coronavirus, we get to homeschool for a 3rd time. I will admit I went through a process to get to OK with this idea.
Phase 1: Mad at the ridiculous school district that wouldn’t offer any remote learning because some kids didn’t have access to the internet.
Phase 2: Happy that I had two months of school left in which to teach the kids the way I always wanted to, but couldn’t because I felt too responsible for them actually learning stuff. In other words, we could have fun with this! They could learn what they wanted to learn, “feed the curiosity” as our friend David Weiss used to say. I could do what I wanted with them.
By the time the school district decided they wouldn’t get sued after all, and that they would indeed be sending out remote learning plans I was in…
Phase 3: Mad the school district was going to send my kids a bunch of work to do because I had a better plan. Once I had that plan I couldn’t wait for spring break to be over so we could get started.

Before I get into a report on homeschool I wanted to mention something fun we did during spring break. I decided to have a reading contest to make things more exciting and to get my older boys to read, something, sadly, they very rarely do now days. I offered a big money prize for the kid who read the most books. The older boys never even tried, but Levi and Liberty read literally the entire two weeks of spring break. They would keep tabs on how much the other one had read and would skip computer time just so they could get ahead, they got up early in the morning to read and would only eat if they were sure the other one wasn’t reading. It was AWESOME! In the end, it was a tie so they decided to split the 1st and 2nd prize.

We have been homeschooling for three weeks now and it’s going great! We aren’t having the same problems many, if not most families are having because we’ve done this before. The kids jumped right back into homeschooling. We have a routine and structure and a purpose. Now that the schools are finally sending stuff, we’ll add that in where it works, but I’m letting the kids help decide what of that they want to do. They have to do one hour each in the following subjects: Math, Reading, Science, History and Outside time. They also get to do an hour of free learning whatever they want. On “Fun Friday” the kids get to learn whatever they would like in the morning and then I get to choose a fun activity for the afternoon. We’ve done Mom’s favorite movies the last two weeks. (It takes great fortitude of spirit to listen to your kids make fun of your favorite childhood movies) Today was a Harry Potter read-a-thon. I’ve been reading Harry Potter 5 to Liberty (and Levi, though he’s already read them) and we are nearing the end so we read all afternoon under the cherry tree. Here was our view-quarantine isn’t so bad after all, I mean, if you gotta be stuck at home wouldn’t you want to be stuck under this?

Here’s what Liberty has been up to:

She’s the dream homeschool child. She wants to do everything, learn everything and is thrilled to be home. Among other things she decided to learn all the major bones in the body and then made a labeled skeleton.

Now she’s moved onto major body organs.

Liberty loves history so we started reading the Story of the World series I used long ago with the boys. She wants to do ALL the coloring pages I had to force the boys to do and she wants to do every activity especially if it involves a craft. We started with Ancient history and it includes ancient Jewish history, so here she is making Joseph’s amazing technicolor dream coat.

Libby was sad she was going to miss the Oregon Trail simulation that her class was going to do and so I asked her teacher for the materials so we could do it as a family. At dinner every night we circle up the wagon trains and make decisions that determine our fate on the OR trail. Her sweet teacher also sent a historical fiction book about the Oregon Trail that she knew Liberty would like. She finished it in just a few days and then decided she wanted to do a book report on it. This is obviously not as detailed as her teacher would require, but she was very proud of it.

I still had a 6/7 grade math program around, ya know, just in case a global pandemic required homeschooling again, and Liberty begged to do it once she got fed up with Kahn Academy. She thinks she’s super cool doing math a few grades higher than her own. She has her dad’s math genes so we’ll see how far she can get.

Stay tuned for Levi’s adventures in knife throwing, the bow and arrow, dart board, sling shot, card tricks, gardening, obstacle course making, WW II and Morse Code.