The interesting thing about homeschooling is that some weeks you want to pull your hair out in frustration and then some weeks all the stars and planets align and you just want to shout for joy! It’s a lot like the weather in Texas, everyone says, “If you don’t like the weather, give it five minutes it will change!” The official slogan of homeschooling so be, “Want to pull your hair out? Give it a day it will change!” Last week was SO hard. I just felt like every day day we were just dragging ourselves along, then this week felt like a scene out of Mary Poppins.

One thing that homeschooling has taught me is to be more adaptable and to trust my mom instincts. If something doesn’t seem to be working, don’t try to push through it or force it. Instead, try to understand where the friction is coming from and see if you can address that friction to the learning by doing something different. I think that a lot of the success from this week came from me being will to adapt. I thought long and hard about last week and what made it so hard, and the answer was pretty simple. I needed to tweak the morning routine just a little bit and then adjust our school day outline. I realized that if I got up 30 minutes earlier, it would literally change the course of the day. It made it so that we were 30 minutes behind every morning to we had an hour and a half of space to get ready and do kid yoga and play before school. I don’t know that that works, but with kids its always the case, you are either 30 minutes late or and hour and a half early. Then, I changed my school outline, and the reason I was able to do that is because…..drum roll……our Good and the Beautiful Kindergarten program came on Tuesday!!!!

The Good and the Beautiful program has literally changed our lives. It is so simple yet powerful and effective. My daughter LOVES it. It’s just the right level of challenging while also being empowering and uplifting. The thing about it though that makes it amazing is that Math, Language Arts and Handwriting are all done in a lesson a day and each lesson takes about 10 minutes. There is no planning prior to teaching necessary, you just open to the lesson of the day and begin. LIFE CHANGING. So now I can plan our school day outline differently. Instead of trying to get creative and combine three different learning levels into one lesson, then trying to help them individually with the work we now do Circle Time, Writing, Language Arts, Snack/ Recess/ Cool Down Story Time, Math and then Chinese. Snack and recess is a 25 minute block, Math and Language Arts is a 45 minute block (each girl gets 15 min) and then the rest are a 15 minute block. Then we have one day each week that we do Science, Art, Geography, History and an Activity. Boom. This week was our first week with the new routine and it was a night and day difference. By small and simple means are great things brought to pass, this saying truly defined this week. We have just consistently each day done a little learning, and by the end of the week the result has been mind blowing.

This was our third week of school, and I felt like it was the start of really seeing the fruit of our labor. It was so great to see my girls’ eyes light up with pride when realizing they knew an answer or could figure out a problem using things they have learned. I feel like we are FINALLY getting our feet under us and getting some traction. It’s been a year since we started our homeschool journey with preschool, and it’s only now that I can with confidence say that both learning and constructive opinions about learning are co-existing.

We had a great adventure to the library where we discovered The Magic Tree House series. I never read this series as a kid, but I’m a huge fan now. We have had so much fun reading about pirates in Pirates Past Noon. It was so fun to read it to them and watch their eyes grow wide and to see their intense focus as they listened to what happened next.

I would say that the MVP of this week was Language Nut. I have wanted to teach my girls Chinese, but I have struggled to successfully do it. Although I speak it, I have realized that doesn’t mean I can teach it. It’s so hard to teach a second language to your children, especially if it isn’t a natural language for you, like Chinese isn’t for me. This week though I really utilized Language Nut, and it was so fun! We did just 15 minutes a day of it, but my girls are really picking it up. It’s mind blowing how easily children pick up new languages. Language Nut teaches in such a great and effective way, and it’s super interactive. I am a huge believer in the iPad when it comes to teaching little kids. iPads helps kids to learn while also using movement in their hands and interacting with the learning program. The app for Language Nut had all the elements I look for in a learning app for my kids, and they liked learning with it too. I’m excited to see where it takes us.

My takeaway from this week is this, Don’t give up. Realize that even if you feel like nothing positive is coming from learning, your little one really is soaking it up and then out of no where the weather will change and there will be no comparison to the joy that you will have when you see the light in their eyes of learning and knowing that you played an integral role in that light in their eyes.