The Great Debate...

I have been reading many of my fellow Blogger's Blogs and I am loving all of the fun things and ideas I am reading about. We like many of you are on our first week of summer break and we (meaning me) are not sure what is more annoying the fighting back and forth or the complaining of everything (honestly everything). I feel like I don't have enough food in my fridge or activities to appease everyone. Hopefully I will be able to get them in a pool a few times over the summer to keep them happy. which in turn will make me happy :).

Although Summer has only just begun we have made a BIG decision in our family that may or may not be a great thing. Now this may be a subject of great debate, but I have made my decision and I am committing to it so the only debating will be in the comment section I suppose. So here is what I will be taking on as of July...I will be HOMESCHOOLING Daley and Slade for this next school year!!

This was something that I never thought I would ever do, but after a difficult year and an uncertain future I feel this will be the best for our family. Dylan is now a Freshman so he is SO NOT interested in being Home schooled (plus he is smarter than I could ever keep up with) and being that he wants to play Football and has many friends from Middle School already.

I told Slade and Daley that if they would commit to one year of home school then they could decide after that if they wanted to continue or go back to public school. I have been checking out some different sites and researching different teaching methods and what I have come to love is that basically you as the parent/teacher decide what you want to teach and how you want to teach it to your kids depending on their personalities/interests. We control how we schedule our day of learning and can choose what subjects we will learn on which days.

I feel really good about this. I just began to feel like with the expanding student to teacher ratio it was becoming an issue with my kids in feeling like they could ask the teacher questions or get extra help if needed. I realize how difficult it must me for teachers to try and get 30 kids to comprehend each lesson and as a parent who ends up teaching the lesson to my child when it is not understood completely anyway, why not just be the teacher myself.

I often pictured in my head what home school would look like for my kids and I always envisioned my children sitting a the kitchen table and me teaching some lesson out of a textbook, blah, blah, blah. But come to find out you can teach your kids school work in more creative ways. I am excited about the possibilities that are as far as I can tell endless. Also when Devin does get a job it will not be a big deal to move where ever we have to, because I won't have to switch the kids schools - we can just take it with us. Except for Dylan of course.

So I would love to hear what you think. Also, I must add one thing that I do worry about a bit and that is the "friends" or "socializing" issue. I am working on this though. I have resources I will be using to make this part work for the kids, so we'll see.

One last thing...PLEASE keep Devin in your prayers in his continued search for employment. It is very difficult right now as many of you know, so all of you are also in our prayers as well.

Keep your head held high and your chin up (or in my case CHINS up hahahaha),
Cami