Erratic Schooling

Life is school and school is life. I keep telling myself this. Yet, I continually feel that ‘oh no, my child isn’t in the classroom working 6 hours a day kind of feeling. Yes, I was educated in the public school mentality, howbeit a very small and tiny school that afforded students the opportunity to learn and not just pass a test. It seems that so many people think that we as homeschoolers sit at home all day and our children just do some worksheets and then play the rest of the day. For Little Man, play time is almost always learning time. His mind just doesn’t shut off when his lessons are over. The reality is, we are usually so busy hopping from one social event to another, homeschool groups, service projects and outside the home classes, that it’s often hard to fit in formal sit down at a table and crack the textbooks kind of schooling. That doesn’t mean I abandon it all together either. What I’m saying is it’s hard to find balance.

The reality is that he is learning and absorbing information all the time at a rate of speed that would drive most people mad. Even when we aren’t in the midst of formal education he enjoys spending his down time trying to figure out the best way to adapt his Marble Mania set into something completely different than the step by step instructions lead him to. He also is working on several K’Nex projects. And I think, I’m going to be pulling out some Lego projects that will be “new” to him. All of this work takes an engineering mind.

He also will spend hours on Khan Academy outside of the work that I assign. He works with various video and computer software game on his own time as well.

On Saturday’s This Week…  post highlighting the previous week, I wrote about how he is of his own free will copying scripture.

He recently has been spending time in his bedroom with an atlas, paper and colored pencils drawing and fact checking everything he can about the states.

This work is entirely outside the scope of our home school work.

So the question becomes, do I just let him run with that? Or, do I stop his progress to make him sit and do “formal” education?

Dilemma, dilemma.

I know he’s learning through these times. Yet I feel guilty about it because it doesn’t feel like the “formal” education that I grew up with and that society expects. How does a homeschool mom balance free education versus structured education?

Finding balance for his differentiated mind is often my biggest challenge as a mom and homeschool teacher. Lately, he’s going through one of his highly emotional periods so stopping his progress on anything can lead to huge dramatic overly emotional reactions. But isn’t it MY job to decide what is best for him?

Ah, off to his weekly spelling lesson we go…