As we reach the end of our school year (10 days left after tomorrow), I no longer feel like I’m homeschooling so much as racing. Will we manage to finish the last of the curricula by the end of the school year, or will it dribble over into summer, throwing off the whole rhythm of everything? Each day is a race to finish another book, another subject, so that summer can be a clean start.
With each book Captain Science completed, I experience a deep sense of satisfaction and accomplishment. It’s not just about another check-marked box on a list (though it’s a little bit about that, as well), but about knowing that we’ve done a subject from beginning to end, that we’ve truly completed the first year of homeschooling (rather than just futzing around until we hit day 180). Making it to the end of the year with something still unfinished, unless it was specifically scheduled to be unfinished, would feel–perhaps unreasonably–like a small failure. I set goals and I want them completed.
Every day is a race. Life of Fred: Decimals and Percents, we manage to put to bed a couple of months ago, pulling it out for review and working on math concepts independently of curricula in the interim. Captain Science finally finished Paragraph Town last week, though he has gone back and redone a couple of lessons in that. Our brain class with Patchfire is completely. The only thing left in the writing class is making corrections to the drafts and mailing them off for submission. Game class has become more of a game club, without a need for an end-date.
Now, we’re chugging along with Building Poems, trying to wrap that up. Ideally, the only book that we will carry with us through the summer is Caesar’s English I, which I never intended us to finish by the end of the year. Far too many lessons for that, no matter how fast Captain Science seems to be zooming through it. This will keep the vocabulary fresh in his head for starting Latin (and Caesar’s English II) in the fall.
Ten days, five of which will not be managed by me, as I leave the boys in the capable hands of Officer Daddyman and the Nana, whilst I jet off to Chicago to doula for my best friend’s first birth. Five more academic days in which to wrap it all up and put it to bed for the school year. I don’t feel ready for this! This year has been such an adventure and a challenge.
Surely I’m not the only one with a deep seated need to have everything neatly wrapped up by the end of the year. How does it work for y’all? Do you leave curricula hanging to next school year? Not finish the school year until everything is finished? Do tell, do tell!
Spinach.
EG is working hard to finish her LoF book – there was a three-day discrepancy, so she’s done six lessons the past two weeks and will this next week as well. Generally, I like to have most things finished, so if one or two have to drag out a bit, it doesn’t feel like school still. I think EG will have a few weeks’ worth of Practice Town, one or two CEI lessons, and two or three Paragraph Town lessons, plus I make her do (different) math and keep current with memory work, vocabulary, etc.
I’m the same way. We’re racing to finish before we move, which was supposed to be this Saturday. Now it’s not (long story). We’re left with mostly read-alouds–which my voice and the boys’ attention span can last for only so long. If a little of that spills over to the summer, I’m okay with it. Reading is fun.
I used to school year-round, when the kids were 5, 3, and 1. Back then we needed more structure to the day. But now with the kids wanting to do summery kinds of things, we like to take a break from the hard stuff.
However, I’ll be ordering curriculum soon, and it’s always funny to me because the kids will dig through it, looking for something to do. I don’t stop them if they’re motivated.
Last year they both started school having done six weeks of math. Worked for me!
Okay. It’s late and I’m rambling. But to answer your question, I don’t like loose ends.
This is our first year homeschooling as well, though I went through Calvert so I had a lesson manual to dictate how much to get done and when. We have 4 days left after today. Though we’ll still be going through the Kumon books this summer. I have had to force myself to let go, for us it’s only Pre-k, so her not really liking the song version of the nursery rhymes, and being a little behind in a few things is fine. The first half of Kindergarten is supposed to be a review, so if she doesn’t pick it up over the summer I know she’ll be fine. I think I would be more stressed right now if I had pieced together my own curriculum (I didn’t have the confidence to that to begin with anyway).
We have an annoying number of things we’ll need to keep working on over the summer. Next year I would like for that not to happen. But we will see. I’ve decided that much of my problem is that I have more than one kid to homeschool, but it’s a bit too late to fix that now.