Weekly Wrap-Up: Leaving Spaces in Your Day

There are always lessons to be learned as a homeschooling family. This year our lesson has been to leave lots of spaces between the planned activities. Spaces to explore, breathe, and to build confidence. I have been thinking a lot about meditation...the kind of meditation that we are encouraged to do in the Bible, to take in knowledge and then digest it so that we benefit from the things we learn. This transfers to our homeschooling life in so many ways.

As our children grow older we no longer are dispensing every bit of knowledge. Teens are capable of reading and comprehending just about anything we offer. The way in which we present the material may vary but in the end, they need to digest it for themselves. This takes time, quiet space, and a growing maturity.

It would be so much easier to hand them a test on Friday to know if they truly learned something for the week. But, would that be real learning? Would it reach their heart and make an impact? There is just so much to know and learn that we sometimes try to pack too much into our week so here is the message of this entry today.

Allow some space for digesting. Allow time for exploring. We don't need to be in a hurry.

Here are some scenes and thoughts from the last two weeks. Last week was our "off" week so we were not officially schooling but Mr. B is in the middle of reading or rereading four books in preparation for a large writing project, a literary comparison paper. He has chosen to read and compare Ray Bradbury with Jules Verne. I can hardly wait to see what Mr. B comes up with for his paper.


We are trying to build on the Simple Schooling Anatomy text with some vocabulary work using this college text. Mr. B is skimming through the terminology and finding terms to research and record on the notebook page I built for him. This is relaxed and interest-driven learning at its best.



Mr. B is still adding to his timeline each week as he reads and digests his history study. The images are his "notes" that he embellishes from at our Friday meetings. (I will be glad when we are done talking about Hitler...)



Update on Mr. A (who officially graduated last year): He has been working on several projects in the shop. The mini-bike above is one that he was given and he is totally refurbishing it with bits and pieces he finds in his dad's stash. This mini-bike has taught many lessons and has provided lots of "shop talk" around our dinner table. It also has provided a project for a few of Mr. A's friends to help out on and that is always fun to watch. I just make pizza for the dirty happy boys when they come in from an afternoon's mechanical work.

Don't forget the spaces in the homeschooling day, homeschooling year, and then life after homeschooling.  You never know what is going to happen....you may just get a purple mini-bike too. :)