The end is in sight people! We have nearly completed (successfully) our first year of homeschooling! Pardon me while I take a moment to do my happy dance. In the Fall I was seriously questioning whether we would continue past the first year. It was daunting, there were arguments and fights, and it was not looking good.

Then sometime this spring it just clicked. We had figured out what worked for us and what didn’t and how and when to do what we needed to do. Just the other day, we had to do school in the afternoon, rather than the morning. Ave realized that she was still done with school before the kids were walking past our house leaving the high school. I was floored when she said to me how glad she was that she got to do school at home.

Hands down this girl’s favorite subjects this year have been Math and Science! I always ask what should be start with, and the answer is always science! She loves learning how things work and why things happen. Math I think she loved, because for the most part it came really easy to her this year. A lot easier than reading and writing.

We’re planning on continuing Read, Writing, and Arithmetic through the summer. I’m not going to be all crazy about it, but I do think she will benefit from the extra work, as well as being fresh when we start in the Fall. There won’t be a ton of time wasted covering things we’ve already learned.

I asked Avie about some of her favorite things about this past school year. Her favorite books were Mr. Popper’s Penguins and Owls in the Family, she loved our field trip to the Museum of Natural History. She didn’t like math so much because it got harder over the year.

I really loved Sonlight’s curriculum. Being that this was our first year, I really felt prepared each day. If you are not into reading and really don’t like reading aloud, then it’s not for you. I love books and I can stand reading aloud. We still haven’t finished all of the books that were assigned as part of the curriculum, but, again, I figure we’ll work through them over the summer.

I think going into Sonlight and KNOWING that we wouldn’t read every single book during the year helped me. That was part of our struggle,  I felt a lot of pressure to READ EVERYTHING and then realized I don’t have to. If it’s not working for us, move on. There were a couple of books that were really hard to get through, so we got them on audible and listened when we were in the car. Some of them, became ones that we read at bedtime. It works. That’s the wonderful thing about homeschooling, you figure out and do what works best for you and your kiddos.

While Matthew and I were away, we had given the grandparents a list of things to read. My father in law spent quite a bit of time with Avie doing her world history reading and he was blown away by how intense and substantial the readings were. I never felt that what we were doing was a waste of time or frou-frou. I have to say, that with everything subject we covered it was always meaningful.

I’ve put together an Amazon store of some of our favorites from this year! I’m hoping to keep adding every year to our library.