Our Homeschooling Journey: Week 1 Down, 35 Weeks More to Go

And just like that, we're done with week 1 of Year 1! Last month, I was buried neck deep with all the planning, pre-reading, and prepping everything that we will need for this school year. This is our second year of official homeschooling but this is the first time we'll be using the Charlotte Mason method.

Our Kindergarten year was actually not what I have envisioned it to be and so towards the end of the schoolyear last year, I decided to look for another homeschooling provider. That's when I met Charlotte Mason and fell in love with her gentle yet strict way of teaching children.

I can't say though that my daughter's kindergarten year was without fruit. It was stressful, both for her and me, but it was still full of learning, discovery, understanding, and accomplishments. Not just for her, but for me. I remember being the proud momma showing off the awards she got from her school.

While I'm not really particular with the numbers and grades she got from school, it's still a bonus that aside from her learning and retaining what we taught her, she has a medal and certificates to show her how good she did last schoolyear. She made exemplary grades and bagged the Highest Honors award during the Recognition day.

Homeschooling the Charlotte Mason Way

One of the good things I see in homeschooling is that it's a lot easier to look for other homeschool provider, being everything can be done online from searching, to enrolling, to purchasing books, and so much more. It was in my quest for finding a better homeschool provider that I found the one that completely fits the kind of parenting I want to implement in my household.

There are 2 principles that I found very much interesting and eye opening:

1. Children are born persons.
2. They are not born either good or bad, but with possibilities for either good or evil.

There are several principles that Charlotte Mason indicated in her Homeschooling series Volume 1: Home Education. These first two resonated a lot to me and now my homeschooling method basically follows these two principles the most. Because of this, our study time is now a lot more relaxed, fun, and spontaneous.

I have a very detailed lesson plan in place but I left some room for spontaneity in our daily schedule. Which means it's open for some real time changes but still sticks to the daily goals. Unlike last year, my teaching method is a lot more gentle yet surprisingly a lot stricter.

Living Books as Our Main Source of Learning

Back in our kindergarten year, the school provided us with text books and workbooks that my kid will be working on throughout the year. At first, the little one was excited because, books. But as we moved from one quarter to another, her excitement was soon replaced with dread for she knows that as soon as we open those books, she will start answering from one item to another, she will have to write things again and again, she will have to just follow the instructions.

I find that her interest slowly diminished and by end of Quarter 3 last year, our drive for learning, hers and mine, has already went down. Hence my search for a new homeschool provider.

For this year, our homeschool provided guided us in looking for living books that we can use for each subject. At first, it was confusing to me what a Living Book is. With all the training sessions and guidance from our current homeschool provider, I now know that a living book is a book that is filled with ideas that are well told and well put that engage its readers, written by someone with vast knowledge of the subject and was written with great passion. Living books does not simply feed information to its readers, it ignites ideas and encourage thoughts.

One example is the book we are reading about instilling values to children: The Book of Virtues by William J. Bennett. This book has 800+ pages in it. At first, my husband thought this will be a boring read for the kiddo. But as we leafed through the pages on our first week, he found it is full of ideas and stories that sticks to the little kid's mind. We are learning about perseverance this quarter. In a normal textbook, all it would have would be definitions of what perseverance is, a few examples here and there, then a few scenario on what should the child do to show perseverance. In this living book, there are several stories in it, each picturing different ways to learn and instill the value of perseverance to a child.

Narration as our Primary Learning Tool

I have talked about narration in my previous blog posts and how it is helpful in retaining information and ensuring comprehension among kids. For this year, narration will be our main tool in our lessons. I will read aloud her books to her, she will listen (instilling the habit of attention) and then at the end of each lesson, she will narrate everything that she understood.

I can see that she is having fun with this method with the way she narrates the stories. The main focus of our narration is to check to see what she knows, not to point out what she doesn't. Then gently correcting any mistakes be it grammar or any major details in the story she may have forgotten. By gentle, we mean not saying "Oh, you forgot this or that." But simply having a conversation about the story at the end of each lesson.

Love of Learning

Last year, I actually heard her say "Oh no, it's Monday again!" A kid to dreading weekdays isn't a good sign. It shows that she's stressed out, tired, and not having fun. She still showed exceptional numbers towards the end of the year.

Towards the end of the year, we adapted the Charlotte Mason method into our daily study session. That was when the energy shifted from hating weekdays because she doesn't want to do study time to excitement because we were reading several living books for kindergarten. We started with A Lolong Time ago, which is about Philippine Studies. Then we also read The Seven Little Sisters who Live on the Round Ball that Floats in the Air (yes, that's a mouthful that's why we call it now as 7 Little Sisters) which is about Geography. We added more experiments and activities for our Science lessons, feeding her curiosity even more.

I was feeling hopeless on the first weeks of January this year (which was the halfway point of our kindergarten year) because aside from the whole family getting sick, we were on the verge of not loving learning. It's a good thing that we were able to bring back our learning mojo.

For our first week in Year 1, I can feel how different our set up is. My kid was once again excited with her books, but right now, it seems like the excitement will continue because each book is filled with a lot of ideas which I can see she digests fully and narrates so vividly and lively. We are just in the first week and her curiosity has been continuously fed and satisfied. And right now, she's craving for more and more new ideas. Now, I don't even have to remind her what we need to study, she is the one who refreshes my memory telling me where we stopped from our last lesson.

Today, we are on week 2. And I can still feel the same energy. Aside from that, I can see more improvements not only in her memory works, but as well in her copyworks. Her handwriting has improved a lot. Not only that, she is actually enjoying writing. She even asked me "Nanay, why didn't you teach me to write this way before? I like my writing!" But out of all the comments she gave, the one that stick to me the most was when she included it in her prayer. She said, "Dear God, thank you that I was able to learn new things this week, and that I had a lot of fun learning. I hope to learn more new things next week."

Hearing this put a smile on my lips. All those sleepless nights last month doing all the planning, pre-reading her books, preparing (and ordering online) all the materials we need for the experiments we will do for the whole quarter, it was all worth it. I can honestly say that choosing our homeschool provider right now has been one of the best decisions I have ever made towards my child's education.