Picture perfect

When a young family starts dreaming of homeschooling, this is not what they imagine:


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Catalogs rarely focus on the kind of boring nuts-and bolts of home educating older kids. Because while there are still science labs, they are no longer the cute kind that lend themselves to facebook photos (“Look! Madison’s first butterfly just emerged!” wins over, “Look! Taylor just located the fetal pig’s stomach!” every time.). And arts and crafts aren’t what they once were, either. Aside from Mathaus, whose art takes digital form more often than not, my kids sketch and fill notebooks pretty regularly. But it’s not as precious to the world at large as when the littles get a quickie lesson on pointillism and spend an afternoon daubing oversized sheets of paper with paint-dipped Q-tips.

The reality of upper grades in our home is lots of paper consumption, heavy doses of discussion, and a liberal use of technology for research. The library system leaves a lot to be desired (see how polite I am?) so we lean heavily on screened web sources and a handful of carefully selected spines to get the bulk of the work done. My boys spend a lot of time in one-on-one meetings with their subject tutor, be it me for most things, Mary Hannah for French, or Dad for science and math. Twice daily, I sit down with them each individually and review what’s taking place in their independent work. I have boys at our schoolroom table, in nooks and crannies, on the couch, sprawled on the steps … doing their thing.

Not as photogenic as discovering great explorers for the first time and crafting a ship out of refrigerator boxes, complete with a rabbit trail that resulted in magnetizing needles for our own homemade compasses.

But learning, none the less. And to this Momma of kids who tower over her own head, every bit as picture perfect.

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