our homeschool adventure

So... I've been intending to write about this for a while now, but haven't gotten around to it yet. We are homeschooling this year! Super exciting. We actually started after Christmas break last year, just as an experiment and it quickly became clear that it was something our family needed to do for at least one more year (and we've promised to just take the whole thing one year at a time). I've actually wanted to homeschool ever since Madelynn started kindergarten, but I was still working in between having babies, and it just wasn't the right time for our family. Why are we homeschooling you ask? For no reason other than, why not? Karl and I figure we have this time while our children are small for only a short period and would like to make the most out of family time. We also want to be able to give them an environment free to experiment and find out who they are a little bit in the safety of their own home, and allow them to develop their own love of learning by exploring their interests in a depth they are satisfied with. It also has been an amazing way for our family to find healing in togetherness, after a bumpy year, and to solidify our core values with one another. We are thoroughly enjoying this time, knowing it won't last forever!

Here's some handy info I've found:
There is a plethora of information for homeschooling on Pinterest. Super fun to search for.

Here is a site I found that includes a curriculum you can buy (I didn't), but she also has a ton of free printables that we used last year for Max, who wasn't yet in Kindergarten, but insisted on doing school time with Madelynn.

These guides are awesome to use. We ended up using the ones that go with the books The Courage of Sarah Noble and The Great Kapok Tree, both of which were great for Madelynn in second grade, and Maximus got to do many of the projects right along with us. But they are also available for many of the Magic School Bus books, which look super fun. What I liked about them is that they include language arts, some math lessons, as well as social studies and art.

This year we are using the Moving Beyond The Page curriculum and are loving it. After doing the units I mentioned above, I decided a literature based approach would be right up our alley. I also realized that piecing together my own curriculum, while doable, isn't how I want to be spending my time these days.