Mohaus School House

We are five weeks into our school year and I wanted to share a bit about how it is going. I had originally meant to post about my plans for the coming year, but life happened and blogging did not.

After a ton of research, our Homeschool is starting to take shape in my mind. I just raided our bookshelf and am pleased that we already have many of the books I intend to use. "The Dangerous Book for Boys" along with "Swiss Family Robinson" are going to be the cornerstone of our school year. #firsttimehomeschooler #homeschool #charlottemasoninspired #delightfullearning #unschooling #boyschooling #mohaus2017

Since about March of this year I had been heavily researching what schooling option would be best for our family. Back in April I wrote a bit about why we are choosing our current path but I hadn't really gotten into the mechanics of it.

Our Math, History and Science books showed up today. Jack thinks we need to start homeschool asap. I'm sticking with next week 😉#firsttimehomeschooler #homeschoollife #kindergarten #jackjack #ilikebigbooksandicannotlie #mohaus2017

In my research phase, I quickly realized how overwhelming the homeschooling path can be....

There was not just home-schooling to consider but also hack-schooling, boy-schooling, world-schooling, road-schooling, field-schooling, game-schooling, and any other schooling you might want to dream up.

School officially starts for us on Monday. This is my attempt to get organized. #firsttimehomeschooler #kindergarten2017 #jackjack #homeschool #organizedchaos #mohaus2017 #mohausschoolhouse 

And there were various teaching methods: should we follow the Charlotte Mason methodology, or Montessori, Thomas Jefferson, Classical Conversations, Waldorf (Forest Kindergarten), Unschooling, or be Eclectic and blend all of these methods to fit us?

And once you have a method that you feel fits your family, there are companies that sell boxed curriculum to help you along in your teaching endeavor: Sonlight, My Father's World, Brave Writer, Five in A Row, and many others, AND oh yeah, what math should we choose? Singapore, Math-U-See, Saxon, Horizons, Life of Fred, Let's Play Math, Smartick, and so many others.

First day of Kindergarten Homeschool for us in the books. We got off to a rough start with our upstairs A/C flooding and leaking through the ceiling in Isaac's room last night which meant a late bedtime for the kids followed by Isaac waking me and Jack at 2:30am. Isaac was awake for two hours so we had a lot of tears (his) and frustration (me). Jack had a really good day, even if we didn't get to everything. #firsttimehomeschooler #lifewithakindergartner #homeschool #mohausschoolhouse #jackjack #learnaswego #mohaus2017 

And then what about co-ops? And socialization? Should we sign up for music? A foreign language? Do we still do sports? How will there be time for it all? It can all be rather overwhelming.

I listened to podcasts, talked to dear friends, read books, scribbled notes, visited a curriculum fair, and went down way too many rabbit holes before I just hit the brakes and decided to make some decisions. You can't do it all. You can't teach (or learn) it all. I decided we needed to focus on what homeschool meant to us and go from there.

Total solar eclipse at Cotton Port Wildlife Management Areaoutside of Dayton ,TN. #totality #solareclipse2017 #homeschool #familyadventure #mohausschoolhouse #mohaus2017

Once I did that, I let go of a lot of the "shoulds" and just tried to figure out the best approach for us. I believe in curiosity and learning as much as you can, all the time, for the length of your life. That's it. Some of the reasons we weren't sending Jack to school included the desire for more time for unstructured play, more time to be outside every day, more time as a family, and less time doing boring worksheets that stifle curiosity.

You (I) might just see a huge mess, he sees a civilization he's constructing (his exact words were: I'm building a civilization). Now that schools are all in session here, I'm starting to have interactions with people regarding our choice of homeschool. Sometimes the conversations make me a bit uncomfortable and may put me on the defensive (like when we chose not to find out the sex of baby #2 or when we used cloth diapers exclusively with #1)... Today I had the best conversation though. We were at a local grocery store and the young woman checking us out asked where Jack went to school. He told her he was homeschooling and she said, "so you are learning all the time then." Yes! Yes we are! Anyways that is my approach to homeschool in a nutshell - learning all the time. #firsttimehomeschooler #homeschool #kindergarten #learningallthetime #learningwell #wegotthis #evenwhenwedont #mohausschoolhouse #mohaus2017

With those things in mind, we decided to kick off our year reading The Swiss Family Robinson. It would be a unit study of sorts (I was going to wing it) and we would build a tree house as a family. That was it, the original concept of our homeschool.

But all of the things I had been researching kept nagging at me, so I made a list of books I thought would be useful in our schooling and narrowed it down to a general guide for our year:

• The Dangerous Book for Boys
• Treehouses and other Cool Stuff: 50 Projects You Can Build
• Elementary Geography by Charlotte Mason 
• Master Books Living Book for Math (book 1/K) and Singapore Math (grade 1)
• The Egermeier's Bible Story Book
• Bearnstain Bears Big Book of Nature
• Some kind of Nature Journal??
• Literature to include: The Swiss Family Robinson, Life of Frog and Toad, Beatrix Potter, Winnie the Pooh collection, and Charlotte's Web
• Early Readers
• Hooked on Phonics (app)
• Journal writing?
• Story of the World for history
• Art??
• Music??
• Homeschool PE (co-op at the YMCA)

We ended up with all of these plus a few more. I love books and I want to share that love with my boys. I also love school and all of the things that you learn in school and I didn't want to leave anything out. I didn't have a real plan, just a set of books and a start date.

Grateful for Fridays with friends. #friendfriday #fridayfriendday #creativediscoverymuseum #homeschool #mohausschoolhouse #mohaus2017

So, what happened on our start of school you might ask? Well, we spent the whole day doing book work. It was busy work that made me feel like we were accomplishing something – schooling at home instead of just enjoying our homeschool. And Jack called me on it. He told me that homeschool was boring and he didn't like it.

Now, I don't believe you have to like everything you are required to do in life. But I do believe that learning should be fun and a spark that should not be extinguished at a young age. So after our first week, I began to think how I could be the change that was needed.

Today was a library day for us. This was Jack's loot... I'm sensing a theme. #unitstudy #arghmatey #kindergarten #homeschool #mohausschoolhouse #mohaus2017

We still get the things done (I want him to be able to read and write), but we are currently following a more relaxed loop schedule, while we chase as many rabbit holes as we wish. 

Thankful to spend time in God's beautiful creation with friends. #friendfriday #fridayfriendday #naturekids #naturewalk #outdoorswithkids #outside365 #mohausschoolhouse #mohaus2017 #kindergarten #homeschool

If I was going to label our approach, it would bet Charlotte Mason/Unschoolish: we have books (mostly living books) that we are working through, but much of our learning is on the fly as we push to discover more about whatever we are discussing.

We try to do writing, phonics and reading, and math on a daily basis. But the everything else? We just do it on a loop. We incorporate other books while also listening to podcasts and sometimes watching TV shows or playing games.

Fun with felt, Jack and I have been working on crafting a pirate ship this morning. #kindergarten #homeschool #mohausschoolhouse #mohaus2017

Jack loves our large dry-erase map of the world. We talk about how long the journey the Swiss Family Robinson must have made compared to our 1,000 mile drive to Canada this summer. And also where all of those animals live in the real world. Everything is learning. All the time.

Fridays spent with friends are our fave. #friendfriday #fridayfriendday #kindergarten #homeschool #mohausschoolhouse #mohaus2017

We cook. We hike. We visit museums. We do fun field trips with friends. We have craft projects based on things Jack is interested in. We are evolving into a school that fits our family. The hardest part – the piece I am still figuring out – is Isaac. Having a two-year-old in the mix of trying to learn has proven very challenging. We are working through that and this week (week 5) has been our best week yet.

I am hoping to share more of our journey on a more regular basis on my blog. What works. What doesn't. What I wish I had done differently. That kind of thing. I think we are going to have a great year!