Last year I read Teaching From Rest by Sarah Mackenzie. If you're interested in the book you can read this POST about it. That book changed the way I looked at homeschooling. I can't say the information was new, but it made me think differently.
One of the big ways I changed up our school year was to only do 2 semesters that were each 15 weeks long. I was the most worried about getting in all of our school days required by my state and starting back up in January after a long Christmas break. I'm happy to say neither of those things were a problem. We actually did more school days than required thanks to weekends of book work. We always struggle to get back into a good routine after Christmas. This year was no different but with a longer break everyone was ready to be back in a routine.
Only doing 15 week semesters gave us breathing room. When we all came down with the stomach flu, school did not happen for a couple of weeks. We lovingly passed the flu around to everyone. There was no stress about how we were going to catch up and still be done on time. We were able to finish all of our work and still be done with school in mid May.
One of the biggest points I took away from the book is that the curriculum is my guide not my master. I took that to heart this year with our History curriculum. I used it as our guide for what we would be studying but did not follow their time schedule. It meant when the boys fell in love with the space race we spent a month studying it, not the 2 days our history curriculum had set aside. Since I did not stress about book work we read a lot more books this year. We have made our morning time together longer and everyone is enjoying it.
Sarah Mackenzie offers special classes to members on her website Read-Aloud Revival. This spring I did her Focus and Align 2.0 class. Through that class Trevor and I wrote our Rule of 6! Every decision we make about our home school journey has to align with these 6 points.
* Read & discuss great books
* Pass on our faith
* Take expeditions
* Find our passions
* Serve others
* Experience the arts
As I'm planning our 2018/2019 school year I'm planning on incorporating all of the things we did last year. I'll be re-reading the book to see if there is anything new I want to add. Have you started teaching from rest? I would love to know what that looks like in your homeschool.
No comments:
Post a Comment