(from the 2nd volume of Homeschooling Cartoons)
Do you ever daydream that your husband takes you to a hotel room filled not with flowers and chocolate, but with all of the homeschooling books that have been teetering on your nightstand for over a year? In my dream, he gives me the key, and kisses me goodbye for a week. Am I just a nerdy home schooling mom?
Conferences (like the one coming up) are wonderful for learning new things and perusing curricula and I almost always come away with more information that I can process in one or two days away from home. Invariably, I gather my courage to attend a lofty workshop on Classical Education and, overwhelmed, find myself wishing I could attend a talk on a simpler topic such as: Homeschooling for Dummies: How Exactly Do You Teach Phonics, Spelling, and Grammar or perhaps Signs You Should Ease Up on Your Child and Assign One Page of Math a Day Instead of Two and even better: Look No Further: Which Math and Phonics Programs Are Indisputably the Best.
Before I am bombarded with new ideas and new books at this year's conference I am hoping to get to a few resources I already have. A few titles I'd love to read for the first time (which of course I could be reading right now if I weren't sitting here blogging the day away):
Penguin Historical Atlas of Ancient Egypt
The new edition of Educating the Whole Hearted Child
The School of the Family: A Renaissance of Catholic Formation
All of the Genevieve Foster books (even though they are not Catholic)
Here are some favorite titles I would love to re-read every year:
The Imperfect Homeschooler's Guide to Homeschooling
The Catholic Homeschool Companion
Real Learning: Education in the Heart of the Home
Designing Your Own Classical Curriculum
all the Sally Clarkson books
Some resources are ones I own but need to implement:
Making an effort to read some of the living history books before or after my kids read them has been helpful. This year I read Florence Nightingale's Nuns, The Golden Goblet, Hittite Warrior, and Ship's Boy with Magellan. Some titles were helpful to me, but not appropriate for young children: With Pipe, Paddle and Song and Nefertiti.
You know another thing that's helpful that I often neglect to do? Read the prefaces and teacher's notes in the curriculum we currently use. Maybe if I didn't have adult-onset ADD with major flare-ups between the hours of 9 am and 9 pm this would be easier for me.
So, do you carve out time for your own inservice days or are you like me and try to read a book here and there before you crash at night?
Minnesota friends, if you see a good deal on Groupon for a week at the Grand View Lodge, call me and let's plan our own continuing ed days, ok?
