Flexibility – the key word in homeschooling!

Last week, we started back to homeschooling after a three week break for the holidays. We took one week off to prayer for the holiday by baking cookies, addressing Christmas cards, putting up the tree, and preparing the music the children would perform on Christmas Eve! One could argue that was an educational week all on its own, albeit not a strictly academic one! The next two weeks they played with their friends, helped me catch up on the laundry, watched movies, walked parks and basically just enjoyed each other. That is what worked for our family and fit our lives the best.

Today we are also using our flexibility to have school on Martin Luther King’s holiday instead of taking the day off. I told the children (particularly my eight and seven year olds) how black people came to this country, what slavery was like. I used several examples from the movie “Roots” to explain how slaves were mistreated. I also explained that the lives of the freed slaves didn’t necessarily get better with the end of slavery. We talked about Rosa Parks. I also explained the bad experience that happened to my mother when she was visiting in the deep south and drank out of the wrong water fountain, explaining at that time that blacks and whites had to use separate drinking fountains and bathrooms. My kids couldn’t believe it. I didn’t use any special curriculum for this, just my own experiences and knowledge of the subject and it worked out very well. More like a conversation than a lesson and I think it had a lot of meaning for them.

Last week, when we were just getting back into the groove of homeschooling, I had the Glenn Beck program on while I was folding some clothes. He had a guest host that day and he was going to spend all three hours interviewing a Holocaust survivor, Sarah Moses. Sarah was only 1 when the Nazis marched into Poland. She was 7 when she was saved from the concentration camp. I knew that this was an opportunity that I wanted my children to have, and so we suspended my lesson plans for that day so that the children could listen to Mrs. Moses’s captivating account of the things that happened to her under the Nazis. Our flexibility allowed us to have this opportunity.

Also last week, we started reading the Trumpet of the Swan. I had planned to read a chapter a day, but the children were so captivated from the first few pages that I ended up reading 5 and only stopped because my mouth was totally dried out from so much reading! But they enjoyed it sooo much, I wanted to make total use of that story to get them totally involved in the book.

I have plans for this week too and hopefully we’ll get through most of it, but I also want to keep my eyes and heart open to those one-of-a-kind teachable moments that come up sometimes unexpectedly!

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homeschooling, carnival of homeschooling, Martin Luther King Day, Rosa Parks, Sarah Moses, Glenn Beck radio, vacation time

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