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Looking back over some pictures and I thought to myself wow, we aren’t doing as bad as I sometimes like to think!!
As a homeschool mom I often feel I suffer from the terminal illness of Homeschool Mom Guilt. The feeling that you just aren’t doing enough. It’s a horrible disease and I pray you never get it. If you do, seek treatment immediately.
Treatment options include
-a good long chat with your homeschool mom girlfriends
– a look back through pictures and/or previous years folders, workbooks, portfolio’s etc to realize how far you’ve come,
– Just Get Over it~!
I like to try to keep my eye on the big picture. Sometimes I have little mantra’s where I just have to say
What is the goal here?
What is the end result?
Will doing more of XYZ achieve that?
or remind myself Human’s are amazing curious intelligent beings, it ‘s going to work if you just let it.
What tools and advantages did Ben Franklin or Abraham Lincoln, Galileo or ( you pick someone great!) have? Certainly not another new fandangled curriculum or more toys…..
Books, pencils, role models perhaps…..
Anyway today as I looked through my pictures I was encouraged and so I’ll share! Here are some snapshots from the Homeschooling Front!
My chalkboard wall, I love this so much. On days where a creative outlet seems like a far away dream, I find simple pleasures in simply drawing on the chalkboard, this is from November and when I looked at it I thought oh yeah!!! we did all that memory work in November! Not too shabby! (you can see I have to be my own cheerleader sometimes haha, you surely don’t hear my kids and my farmer telling me I rocked it with the memory work that week!)
PS my board doesn’t look quite so great this week month, it’s been a hard month.
I .WILL. NOT. GET. HOMESCHOOL. MOM. GUILT.
Good gracious?!? Was this me who wrote that out?! It must have been one of my better days!!!! My oldest was just not grasping the word problems so after repeating myself for several days I had an AHA moment! Write it on the wall then for the whole month whenever you hear “Mom, this isn’t working!” you can cleverly say, “Did you read through the steps on the wall?”
Reminding myself of this better moment goes a long way in easing the HSMG (Homeschool Mom Guilt, you already figured that out right?)
This is just a picture to keep my promise of making sure I keep it real around here. No “pretending life is perfect” mom here. That is real. So real it’s kind of horrible. That, my friends, is the homeschool table! Please don’t judge?
Ahhhh, that’s better. Good news is, it’s never as bad to clean up as you think. Bad news is, it’s going to get bad again quickly!
I love looking at pictures like this. They make me think. This! This is homeschooling at it’s best, deep into a game, getting along, learning as you go.
Relationships and cooperation.
A good day right here.
And lastly I have been trying to remember to share this forever. I’m not sure why but it says a lot about us. I think. This is the wall of our dining room. Lots of learning takes place here and though I love a good home and garden magazine, no amount of style takes precedent over an ABC poster or a map.. you know those things.
About a year ago Grace found this in my farmer’s market tote and felt compelled to put in on the wall along with the other educational materials. No one really questioned why, and so there it has hung for over a year now. And about once a month I look up at it and I just crack up.
It’s so funny.
It’s so us.
It’s hard to imagine walking into anyone’s dining room and seeing a poster of primal meat cuts. It makes me laugh just to type it!
But in the scheme of life I suppose it is quite educational and informative.
Why not?
So there you have it friends. Notes from the Homeschool Front.
Until next time
~thisfarmwife
Feel free to send a note if you need help treating HSMG, I know it well!
