Letting Go

No matter how good something might seem, it may just not work for your family. I think this is especially true for homeschooling.

"...we also suck in messages from everything from the television to advertising to marketing, etcetera. These are hugely powerful forces that define what we want and how we view ourselves. What I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but that we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas and make sure that we own them, that we’re truly the authors of our own ambitions." Alain de Botton

I am not going to do typical sit-down school with my son. I have known this for awhile, but somehow I keep coming back to it. I need to accept it, the sooner the better, and find instead what will work for us. As a little girl, I would have loved for someone to supply me with endless, increasingly difficult workbooks on various topics which I would have then happily completed. (By upper elementary, not so much. All I wanted to do at that point was read.)

Although it may seem like a trivial thing, I came to this realization (again) about our "school" by reading a post about a program called Reading Eggs (to which I'm not affiliated in any way). It sounds like a wonderful program and has worked for many families whose blogs I read. It would have worked for me as a child, for sure. But my son may never enjoy sitting down at the computer to complete a lesson, no matter how engaging it is designed to be. And definitely not now.

This isn't a bad thing, and at some point in his development there will be a need for seatwork and computer programs, but I have to accept that for now at least, this isn't us.