I want the baby to learn to sleep through the night - that would make the holidays very magical indeed 🙂

We started hs'ing when my oldest was entering 8th grade, so even though this is only our 7th year, I've taught all the grades K-12 twice and some 3 times. So I feel like I'm a combination of not-quite-newbie and not-quite-veteran 🙂 We were very disturbed by how expectations from the ps kept creeping higher and higher and infringing more and more on our family life. I wanted to keep our family dynamic strong and vibrant, not play 2nd fiddle to the school and his peers. So our #1 priority from the get go was creating and maintaining a strong family bond (both parent-child and sibling-sibling). That's still our highest priority, and we make sure to build time for it into our day, even for high schoolers. But the longer we hs the more benefits I see to it that I didn't anticipate or imagine, and seeing those benefits makes me want to protect them and nurture them and ensure they continue, so other priorities have been added, if that makes sense. My oldest is gifted, and we knew he was bored in ps, but it wasn't until he was hs'ing that I realized just how gifted he was and how much more he was capable of. So one of my priorities became challenging him (and all the rest of my kids too, even though they are not necessarily gifted) to the best of my ability. I knew all my kids had different personalities and strengths and weaknesses (duh), but seeing them actually play out in our day to day life and schoolwork that first year was eye-opening for me and I began to really see what all the hs'ing blogs meant by "individualized instruction". So that became a priority as well. One of the biggest benefits I saw after making the switch is how much more time my kids have to develop their own interests than their ps friends have. So I've been very deliberate about not infringing too much on their free time so as to cultivate that. I want to challenge them academically, whatever that looks like for each kid, but I don't want to get so carried away by rigor that they don't have time to do their own thing and be their own person. Keeping that balance is my 2nd highest priority after our relationships. I love hanging out on these boards, and I've learned so so so much from all the combined wisdom here. But the boards can be intimidating, and they tend to have a very definite bent towards academic rigor. I felt so overwhelmed at how much more everybody here seemed to be doing than us those first few years that I never, ever posted but just lurked and occassionally liked a few posts. As the years have gone on, I've felt more comfortable sharing what we do and am more of a regular poster. I almost never post on our local FB group. Here, I feel I'm kind of average and middle of the road about academics. But on FB I seem like a slave driver whose kids never see the light of day.

Land's End

Oh my word. Tears, tears, tears, and maybe just a teeny weeny little bit of Christmas spirit starting to stir, even though I am staunchly in the "no Christmas til after Thanksgiving" camp!

I usually recommend the first few chapters of Cathy Duffy's book - they really helped me define what my goals were and what my philosophy was and my teaching style and my kids' learning styles when I was starting out. Every few years I go back and revisit it just to see where I/theyhave changed.

I think it deals with these issues very appropriately for middle school. It does not gloss over atrocities committed by any means, but neither does she go I to detail. She actually spends a fair bit of time talking about how being truly patriotic means that we look good and hard at how we have behaved in the past so we don't make the same mistakes again.

This reminds me of my conversations with 2nd DS years ago 😊 I could not for the life of me figure out what was making him stink so bad and we ended up having many detailed conversations about his bathing habits. Turns out his little 10 year old self was shocked - shocked, I tell you! - to discover that "washing your hair" is not a matter of simply putting a dab of shampoo on the top of your head and rinsing it off. And that "showering" actually involves creating suds on the washcloth *with soap* and rubbing it vigorously all over your body, not just standing still in hot water for a couple minutes. 🙄

I will admit to fawning just a little bit over Dr Jay Wile when he judged our speech and debate tournament one year. No s@xual favors though!!! 😂

My kids do debate and it is i.n.t.e.n.s.e. I usually do not assign any English whatsoever during debate season because they are already researching and writing a ton for that. Maybe that would help lighten the load? Our debate season lets up after November and they do more traditional lit after that.

WTM, Mensa, Sonlight, Honey for a Child's Heart

This. So much this. Honestly our school is pretty typical. They read and write and do math and it's pretty vanilla. I hate crafts and projects and so do the kids (except the really young ones). We discuss and read aloud and I learn along with them, but it's nothing special and it certainly wouldn't get me any traffic if I blogged about it. We read/memorize/recite poetry and they do one EC at a time once a week that bleeds over into all aspects our lives, but that's as out of the box academically as we get. But they have time ... glorious time ... DS#1 used it to teach himself 2 or 3 programming languages. DS#2 used it to teach himself video editing software and music composition. DD#1 used it to write a full length novel. Right now DD#2, 3, and 4 just use it to play, but I fully expect they will also find their passions in due time.

Oldest DD was 5 and I got her started taking a bath, then got busy doing other things and forgot she was in there. Half an hour later I realized I hadn't seen her in a while and found her asleep in the tub with her head hanging down just a few inches from the water 😨 2nd DS was 14 and had to sign a waiver for a white water rafting trip and he didn't know how to write his birth date correctly in month/day/year form. Pretty much all of oldest DS's 11-12 years. I'm quite sure there are more if I think about it a while.

That is such an interesting insight - I had not thought of that before!

Forgive my awkward phrasing. I wasn't trying to say that other countries should model their child care practices after ours. My point was simply that sometimes when we sincerely desire to help people with their needs we inadvertently end up hurting them in the long run because we haven't considered the long term consequences of our "help". I was trying to give another example of when that can be the case.

I was happy as a latch key kid too, mostly because I could do whatever the heck I wanted and feel like I was "in charge" which was very empowering. That's not the case with most of these after school programs. This. Research shows that kids benefit from unstructured free time to think, create, choose, interact - or not. My experience from when I was working in a school and in my few education courses in college tells me that when the school is in charge of it and large groups of kids are involved, *someone* will organize activities and tell kids what to do and when. I don't think you can equate a home/family setting with an institution. The dynamic and setting and interactions are so very different. It's not that they are government run that makes it institutional, in my mind it's more of a fact of life of the logistics involved any time you have large groups of people to manage in one location that makes it an institution.