Year 3 homeschooling

By the following school year, 2007, we realized we had better get serious about curriculum so we attended the Texas Homeschool Coalition Southwest Convention and Family Conference  and after looking at dozens and dozens of homeschool curriculum booths in the convention center, we decided since our boys loved reading SO MUCH that Sonlight curriculum was the best choice for most of the core subjects and we were very impressed with Math-U-See's approach to teaching math!  We also signed Jonah up to attend a one-day academy that provided a preschool classroom environment that he attended from 9-3 on Thursdays.  We delayed the start of our schooling until October due to the fact that we had, once again, added yet another boy, Nathan, to our family in the middle of July making it four boys in four years, 11 mos, and 18 days; just shy of five years.  Once Nathan was sleeping through the night, we kicked off real curriculum (Intro into World History) and the boys thrived!  We had a wonderful time reading gobs of chapter books together on the couch or up in their playscape, sitting at the kitchen table doing addition and subtraction problems, Leap Frog Spanish Memory Game on the floor of the living room, and science experiments on the kitchen island.  Along with making homemade strawberry jam, planting flower beds, and so much more together.  Many, many wonderful memories!  Homeschooling had created exactly the kind of environment we had hoped for: an opportunity for education and an opportunity for relationships; God wants the heart of the family and homeschooling is one way to do it!

An excerpt from my 2007 Christmas letter:

"Shane and I attended a homeschooling conference in Houston towards the middle of August in which we broadened our knowledge of homeschool curriculum and also discovered each of our children’s “learning styles” and what curriculum would work best for them.  I held off starting school until Nathan was sleeping through the night which occurred at the beginning of October.  It has been an absolute delight teaching my boys!  It does demand a great deal of my time and at times I think about how much I could be getting done if they were in public school.  But then I see how far along they are in their learning and what a precious time this is that I get to spend with them and how fleeting that time is and I realize I wouldn’t trade it for anything!  It took me a couple weeks to get into the groove of their literary based curriculum, “Sonlight”, but now the boys and I love it!"