Our first break from homeschool

The aunty, uncle and cousin are here for holidays and Sean begged me to have a holiday from school. Why not? Sure, I said, go ahead. You can have your break from school. After all, this is what homeschool is about. You are able to plan your days the way you want it.

It's really nice to have a break, although as a mum, I don't get any real holidays.. ha ha... But it allows me to do other things for Hannah's playgroup. I guess this is how homeschool mums all over the world have to plan their time and energy.

As my hubby and I looked back to the first few months of homeschooling, we reviewed our objectives. What did we want from pulling our son from school?

We wanted him to have:
1. An enjoyable childhood
2. A love for learning
3. A relevant education
4. Independence
5. An ability to ask questions

When we look at him, we feel so happy that he is a happier person than he was last year. He has regained his cheerful self. He is showing interest in learning new things and has improved much in his attention span.

What about his study?

I started with wanting to follow Charlotte Mason's method but within weeks, we went into unschooling. It just felt natural to organically tailor our lessons to what we felt was interesting.

But I was glad we stuck through with some of the recommendation from Ambleside Online. I was a bit apprehensive if he would be interested in Little Duke and Understood Betsy when we began. After all, they are rather long books and are rather wordy. But I'm glad to say that he started to enjoy the stories as we got into the book. We spent 16 weeks on them and it was nice to read them slowly rather than rush through them.

Although we read many other books at the same time, I have to say that I remember these 2 books really well because we kept them in mind for so many weeks. They have truly found a place in our hearts. If you ask me what other books we read all these other months, I would tell you, "Hold on.... let me check in my list..."  ... ha ha ha.....

We also did Famous Men from Greece, but because each chapter is a short story of a different character, it didn't really stick with us, well.... not me anyway.... . One of the reason could be that there was not much continuation from one chapter to the next. So it makes sense to look for books that are well written.

When we started lapbooking, Sean began to be interested in doing independent work. But it's still new to us and not everything I found was as interesting to him as it was to me. There's still a lot for me to learn..... In fact, there's so much to learn that sometimes I wonder where should I begin?