How is your school year wrapping up? We have had our fair share of panic this year. One of the great benefits of homeschooling is the ability to handle life’s challenges and interruptions as a family, and adjust the learning schedule to accommodate. Usually by the time April and May roll around I can start to get a bit cynical about the success of our school year. I start to look at curriculum for next year, and I begin to lament about all the plans that I had for our year that never came to fruition, or were left unfinished. Isn’t it interesting that as homeschoolers we feel so confident in our abilities one minute, and the next we are genuinely worried that no one cracked a book open at all? Of course the reality is that many books were cracked open, minds were cultivated, and, even if it feels a bit deflated, if we were diligent in our calling, even amid the interruptions and sickness and set backs, we have had a successful year.
I started this school year with different goals than what I esteem even now. I had grand visions of Latin fluency and world map memorization. What I see now are four kids who have made great strides in Latin vocabulary, who picked up on things that weren’t really the focus of some of our lessons which prompted further exploration, and the realization that it can take a kid a lot longer to read Watership Down than I anticipated. But I digress.
God bless the end of the school year, and revel in the grace that He gives us through the excitement of planning next year. Prayerfully by the time our children have left home we will have a solid grasp on how to organize our homeschool, and we will have the wisdom to see that the kids weren’t the only ones who were supposed to grow.