Prepar­ing for this up-com­ing school year has looked dif­fer­ent than all the years before. It seemed to me, for a long time, that the gram­mar stage would just last for­ev­er. Get­ting com­fort­able with days that aren’t as suc­cess­ful as I would have liked them to be took a while, but it hap­pened. After years of home­school­ing, those days when the only thing that we had accom­plished was read­ing a book, are viewed as bless­ings. But my kids are grow­ing up (as they do), and the school sched­ule is more intense. Next week will be our first day of school, and the first time we will be doing school togeth­er with anoth­er family.

Sud­den­ly, my propen­si­ty for start­ing the morn­ings late will be a thing of the past. It has to be, or their class­mates will be arriv­ing mid-paja­ma-wear­ing. Even though I’m a lit­tle ner­vous about this change, I am excit­ed for what it will offer: group dis­cus­sions over great books, some­one to prac­tice Latin vocab­u­lary with, and hon­est­ly, a lit­tle more moti­va­tion to get things moving.

What we are doing is not nec­es­sar­i­ly what oth­er home­school­ers are doing, but isn’t that the beau­ty of home-edu­ca­tion? We get to be cre­ative, try new things, and in the midst of it all, our kids get to expe­ri­ence learn­ing in a way that a lot of us wish we could have experienced.

May God bless you as you pur­sue His will for your home­school this year.