A New School Year and a Solar System on the Ceiling

Our first year of homeschooling was, essentially, our "trail run:" I didn't know what I was doing, had no time to prepare, and was pretty much flying by the seat of my pants all year long.  Somehow, we survived with our sanity and relationships in tact, if a bit weary.  Equally amazing, the J-Rex managed to learn an amazing amount and grow tremendously no matter what I did.  Kids are resilient like that...something I think the more high-strung homeschoolers like myself need to remember when we're worrying about providing the perfect learning environment for our youngsters. 


Regardless, I have been enjoying having a whole summer to plan for this coming year - our second year homeschooling, but our first year doing it the way we want.  I have a lot of exciting things planned for the year and am looking forward to trying out a block schedule that will include the Core Standards as well as the Expanded Core Curriculum in a distinctly un-schoolish style that combines my favorite elements of Waldorf, Montessori, and whatever-the-heck-I-think-will-work-for-my-child. 

I'm also excited to be undertaking a lot of the "inner work" that is mentioned so often in the Waldorf materials I've been reading. I am my daughter's primary influence and I plan to be as good of an example for her as I can be, including letting her see me work on myself as I ask her to do the same. We're all growing here...and I do love to tend my garden.

Playing School

Now, the J-Rex has had a few glimpses of the planned "schedule" and topics we'll be covering and this has begun to generate a bit of excitement for the coming year.  I purposely scheduled the beginning of our school year for the day after Labor Day to give us time to capitalize on this excitement, as we're hoping to go to some events around town over the Labor Day weekend to serve as a last "vacation."

Vacation, though, is such a funny thing in homeschooling because you're always learning on vacation and always doing fun, vacation-y things for homeschool. You're never really sure where one ends and the other begins, which sometimes makes for a difficult differentiation between school and, well,  everything else. 

There would be a lot of people in the homeschooling community that would argue that there be no differentiation between school and life, and, from an objective if idealistic stand-point, I agree with them completely.  From a personal view, however, I see the distinction of a new school year and school versus "free" time as essential for our family, in general, and for raising the J-Rex to have common experiences to her peers, specifically.

So, we have some exciting first-day activities planned, like creating a school mascot, doing school pictures, and trying to make the day a bit of a celebration.  As part of this, the J-Rex and I decided to re-decorate the house for the upcoming school year.  The first part of this project was a particularly brilliant idea we had never gotten around to when we were studying space in science last year:

Using printable planet cut-outs, we created, not a mobile, but a solar system on our ceiling with the planets' (very loosely estimated) relative distances from the sun accounted for.  We left extra space for the asteroid belt and talked about the proto-planets that can be found there. Due to the recent back-and-forth about whether Pluto is a planet or not, the printable we used didn't include this beloved member of our solar system.  So, we added our own Pluto and discussed its unusual orbit and role as a  dwarf planet.

 

...and, of course, we had one more addition:  Outside of our Solar system, there is a planet as big as Jupiter and as red as Mars. It is the home to a most unusual creature, from which it gets its name. This is the homeworld of my most precious charge...this is...

 

(If this is a peek of what's to come this year, I can't wait till school starts!)