Homechooling and a little bit of knitting

Recently I have been asked about why we choose to home school our children, and if we feel that it is really beneficial to kids. That question is obviously a tough one to address, because every child and every family are so different. What works for one will not work for everyone.

We chose to home school for a lot of reasons. Some were based on health issues, some on the quality of public education, and some on the strong feelings that we wanted our children to live their early years with more peace and tranquility than the rigid schedules of school would bring.

Homeschooling is not an easy choice. There are always the questions of whether your child is getting enough social interaction, learning what they "need" to succeed in the world, and of course the issues of making sure that you have the time that you need to teach the children the way that you want them to learn.

This is our first year of true homeschooling, and we have used three different Waldorf based curriculums to start. Little Acorn Learning, Live Education and A Little Garden Flower. We have a 5 and 3 year old, so these are really perfect ways for us to have introduced the concept of homeschooling, and to help us begin to find a rhythm to our days. Creativity, story telling and the cycles of nature are very important to me right now for this time in my children's lives, and Waldorf fits very nicely with our needs.

As we are moving towards Spring, and my children are getting a bit older, I have begun to explore how the next stage of homeschooling will look for us (it is always changing, according to our kid's and our needs). For us, we are exploring the balance between introducing unit studies and still keeping a large focus on learning through exploration. We have very good friends who are considering bringing their children home for school, and they have introduced us to what unit study can really look like.

As a homeschooling family, everything in your life is a part of education, and that is really what I love about the way our children are learning. There is not a designated time for learning, but rather all of our time together is in some way a moment for education.

Homeschooling works for us right now. That may not be the case in 6 months or in 6 years, but in this moment, it is something that brings all of us a lot of peace and joy. Homeschooling is a lot of work, and you are constantly having to remind yourself that you do not have to teach your children everything that they need to know in a short amount of time. Unless you are choosing to unschool, there is a lot of prep work that can go into your weeks and planning your activities, and time management can be very important for the homeschooling family. This is a piece of the homeschooling puzzle that I can often get lost in, and balance is always an issue that I personally struggle with.

Community and support can be really important in homeschooling, so I am planning on posting her with a lot of the questions, activities, and ideas that we are working with. Hopefully it will be a fun way to explore what is working for us, as well as a way to gain ideas from what others are doing.

And now for some knitting!



I took a lot of knitting on vacation with me, and I got to almost none of it. I do have three bigger pieces currently blocking that I would like to be able to post about soon, and hopefully Stacy Z and I will get to shooting them over this weekend. For now, I have three knitted bowls that I managed to make while away.



This is the pattern from the book, One Skein, and I can not say enough good things about the pattern. I love the knitted bowls, they make wonderful gifts, beautiful storage for around the house and a great way to cheer just about any one up. I made these three using brown sheep bulky, and I have about 7 more ready to be felted and gifted. They are fun, easy and pretty sturdy. My mom asked me, "what would you use that for?" Well, for one thing, keeping shells collected on a family vacation. They just make everything so much prettier.