I am Heather, age 30, married to Jamie, age 33, for 10 years. We have three little people running around our house and one more sitting up and trying to crawl.
Ani is 8 1/2. She’s intense and rather advanced. She tells people she is a third grader but she’s homeschooled (because, clearly, please are supposed to realize that means she really is no real exact grade level).
Cameron is 7. He’s a wonderful and creative yet stubborn little man living in his own little world. He is reading now and loves to do math. He’d be in first grade this year, however we tell him he can say he’s a second grader since he misses the cutoff by just 3 days.
Fritz is our active yet adorable toddler. He is 2 1/2. He spends most of his time playing, but spends a few minutes each day doing Tot School. He thinks he’s the same age as the big kids so school is a must for him now.
Adrian is our sweet, sweet baby. He was born in June this year. He spends all of his time nursing or playing and smiling at his big siblings.
Christmas 2008
Now a little background on our homeschooling journey. I was homeschooled for a few years. I met Jamie in a college class when I should have been in my first month of my senior year of high school. Thank goodness I had been homeschooled and in college early. I of course planned to homeschool my kids from the time before they were even born. Luckily Jamie’s always been willing to go along with my oddities.
When Ani was almost 4 1/2 she decided it was time to start “doing school.” We went with Calvert School for her kindergarten work. It was fine, though after a couple months Ani learned to read (using their Come Read With Me program) and then the work was just plain too easy for her. She raced through the rest of her coursework.
For first grade I decided to put together my own stuff. She raced through that way too easily, too. We tried Alpha Omega. I had enjoyed it when I was homeschooled. But she had a tendency to go WAY too fast and finish a whole LIFEPac in a day or two. We tried workbooks from Barnes and Noble and BJs. Again, she raced through them way too fast.
Our next step was KONOS unit studies. We did the Africa unit summer 2005. We had a ball. But it’s not quite a right fit for Ani. She’s not into arts and crafts and really is more of a workbook (and textbooks, too, much to my chagrin) girl. So on we went trying to figure out what to do next, though we had done other unit studies I’ve written and we enjoy them as long as they aren’t the main part of the kids’ education.
Then I got pregnant with Fritz and between the throwing up and feeling all icky we pretty much did nothing specifically educational. We read a whole lot. We were keeping track of the number of books we read from September 1st through April 30th for a reading club. We read over 1600 books in that time, the majority by the end of January.
Unschooling does not work for Ani. I am extremely attracted to the unschooling way myself, but for Ani school must be obvious learning for her to be happy. By January she was absolutely begging for real school. Luckily I was feeling better being in my second trimester so that was a possibility. Then I read The Well-Trained Mind. It resonated with Jamie and me and we decided to try out classical education with Ani. Oh, boy! It was a perfect match. For her.
And then there is Cameron. He was not much into doing anything that looks like “doing school” or school at home. Unschooling does work for him. In trying to find what works for both of the big kids we took a look at what works for each of them and realized that reading works for both. Literature based. So now we are using Sonlight. It is the right fit for them both and is working wonderfully. Sonlight has been so great through both cores we’ve done that I don’t even get distracted by all the other bright and shiny things out there.
Updated 11/30/08
