Big Changes and Little Blessings

Our Family has been through quite a bit since my last post. I feel like life has been on hold as we've eagerly awaited the birth of the baby. On December 15, 2008, our little blessing was born - Josiah Immanuel Walker. He is such a sweet little baby (even if he prefers to sleep all day and look around, make noises, and eat all night.) Well, now I'm mom to 4 boys and a little princess, and big changes are in order.



During the course of this pregnancy, I realized that our homeschooling was really becoming an overwhelming process. It was tough on the kids and tough on me. Getting all those subjects done with all those kids was becoming a task that took more time than we had. The joy of learning was leaving our home. Donald was so busy with his own schoolwork that he couldn't help out much, though he did try. We were all pretty frustrated. I began to look, yet again, into ways to find the homeschool method that fit our family in our situation. I knew that once the baby arrived things would be even more hectic.

What to do? - Well, it's been years since I became aquainted with curriculums like Accelerated Achievement and the Robinson Curriculum. I've loved the idea behind them: allowing the children to take charge of their educations and teach themselves. I've just never had the assurance to go ahead and do it. Another issue has been that I have different texts that I would like to use and I would feel like I was wasting money by buying a curriculum and then using other books for half the subjects. I then came across a great article by Joanne Calderwood in Homeschool Enrichment Magazine I saw a way that the method I had long wanted to try could be compatible with the curriculum I wanted to use.

So with the new semester and the new year we will plunge deeper into an experiment that we started a few weeks ago. The children will be, with my supervision, teaching themselves. Maybe I'll have time to write about it - LOL.