And we’re off!!  After months of daydreaming, planning and choosing resources for this homeschooling term, today we actually started using them!

Taking the advice of experienced homeschoolers (I love homeschool blogs!), we are easing back in gently, so just a bit of maths and history today.

And I got to play with my new whiteboard! 🙂 Which will hopefully help me strike a balance between complete freewheeling and having a bit of structure to our days.  As C very perceptively put it , “if we don’t know what’s planned, we make our own plans”.  Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing –  I want C and J to have LOTS of free time to find and explore their own interests and passions – but I also want to provide some signposts to point the way to things I think they might enjoy and find useful.  A few ready-made curricula and a modicum of planning should help with that intention, and keep me accountable!

I also like knowing when the pro-active part of my role is “done for the day”.  Of course I’m still available to the children after we’ve ticked off the day’s scheduled “subjects”, but without any kind of plan I have a tendency to spend the whole day in a state of mild anxiety, offering “suggestions” from that place – which never ends well!

I’m not sure who graffitti’d my whiteboard (in red) this evening, but I’m not complaining.  I think it was probably C, who exclaimed several times this morning, “this is SO much better than school!” As she only left school last December, and we recently turned down a place for her at a local “outstanding” junior school (where she would have started today), this was very nice to hear.  🙂