You gotta have faith

For homeschoolers in our area, the year starts out with the bi-annual review. It seems like such a harsh way to begin the new year. I know that in the 3 years I have been homeschooling, December is a month that we sorta slow down. We decorate, craft, sing carols, and read all sorts of Christmas books. And I know that the review is coming, but I still spend December enjoying the season. This year we had the added distraction of moving and rehabbing our 110 year old house. So this December we read and sang, but the boys also learned to plaster and paint, and had a crash course on budgeting and balancing what NEEDS to be done as opposed to what we WANT done. We snuck in a little bit of more traditional school-- our curriculum wanted one of the boys to map their rooms, their house, and their neighborhood-- a great way to get to know our new surroundings.

But I was distracted. Very little got logged, and I was a bit nervous going into the review. I knew that we had a new reviewer, as the wonderful woman who had always reviewed us passed away over the summer. I didn't know what the new reviewer was looking for. I knew that while we were doing wonderfully with reading, language arts, math, social studies and science, my boys' handwriting and spelling weren't necessarily what they could be looking for. My personal philosophy is that handwriting doesn't have to be perfect, just readable. And I personally use a google search to spell things. That didn't stop me from debating handwriting drills and spelling tests vs "by the time they are in college everything will be typed and you'll 'sign' your name with a thumb print or retinal scan."

In the end, common sense won out. I let them write in their normal way. There were no spelling tests, but we worked together to correct the spelling on the things they wrote.

We passed the review. The reviewer thought that our stuff was great, but she was really impressed with my older son's drawings and architecture knowledge. And the fact that my younger son was so interested in his brother's Roman numeral lesson that he decided to answer his division work in Roman numerals.

I found it interesting, that while I decided to go a more traditional route with a purchased curriculum, the things she liked best were things nurtured by our unschooling background.