Currently, we have a 10-year-old son (a 5th grader for 2014-15) and a 5-going-on-25-year-old daughter (a new Kindergartner).  We have homeschooled since the oldest was entering Pre-K.  The list of reasons is really, really long but physical health (for my oldest) and emotional health (for my youngest) are significant factors for my particular family.  Everything else is really secondary to these priorities.  Not that they don’t matter, just that these two things are the things that drive us to ensure the continuity of educating our kids at home.

I’m a plan-and-execute-er at heart and we have gone the full spectrum of ways to educate a kid at home.  We had finally gotten to a “follow the child” mentality that worked well as long as children were doing something that didn’t take mama out of her comfort zone.  🙂

This past year was kind of an eye-opener for us.  Long story very short: we had to do a battery of psychology testing on our son and the results were rather surprising.  Where most kids his age average about 15 responses on a Rorschach test, Gig had 90.  There were a number of tests done.  We also definitively ruled out an attention problem.

I’m a fan of this kind of testing when 1) the day-to-day activities of a child seem to be affected negatively by their behaviors; and 2) the results are being used to understand exactly what a child’s strengths and weaknesses are so that the adult can accommodate them rather than change them.  Tests are by NO means the be-all-end-all on this matter; but they’re a really good jumping off point or can at least provide you a direction to go in.  They really don’t have all the answers and sometimes, they can even be inaccurate.  For us, the results explained a lot for us, and we have been able to change some things in our home that have made our son’s life an easier experience for him.

That being said, BoyChild has shifted gears this year and is suddenly looking for “more”.  He wants a more Socratic method of learning “instead of just reading books” and he wants to do more “cool stuff with science–like building atoms”.  Girly, on the other hand, has stopped saying that she wants to learn to read and is happy to do lots of art and athletics.

Mama has very mixed feelings about all of this.  I want to follow my kids, but I’m feeling very fish out of water.  This blog is my journey from being a pretty lax semi-unschooler to changing course at the behest of (mostly my oldest) child/ren.

Today was day 1