Our fall schedule appears to be exploding, and so is my head. I’ve come to a realization that this is sometimes why people put their children in school: school is at one location and at a specific time. That seems so easy.
Really, it’s not so bad. I’m just trying to wrap my head around our first official year of home learning, and my brain is exploding. That is all.
At times like these, I wish I was a work at home or stay at home mom. However, I know that every life has different challenges. Stay at home moms often juggle the schedules of multiple children. Work at home moms – well, being one of those part time, I know that balancing work and home life can be challenging, because they both occur in the same space and sometimes at the same time. Add educating your children into the mix, and life becomes definitely crazy.
I am an unschooler by nature, and in my ideal world I live on a farm, I work at home and wake in the morning to farm chores and my daughter playing. We play and work together all day, and we take a relaxed approach to life. In my reality, I live in a very expensive suburb in a wonderful townhouse complex with a lovely but small garden. I have to work outside the home, and I work at home part time and outside the home part time. This makes it challenging to plan my life.
For years, we have relied on grandparents to help with the child care of our daughter. However, now that she is school age, the grandparents are interested in helping after school. This means that I need to find activities for my daughter to do while I work, and it also means that I need child care.
Working part time also means that any formal schooling that we do as part of our home learning has to be placed on the days when I am home. This means that the days when we’re home seem to be packed with home learning activity, and the days when I am at work seem to be packed with classes, albeit fun ones. Of course, none of this is as much time as she’d be spending in school, and she still gets to spend a lot of fun time with her family and extended family.
What are we doing to make this year a little more sane?
Work a little less. I’ve cut down on some hours at my out-of-home job so that I can focus more on homelearning.
Make it fun. We’re going to do some formal education, but it will mostly be in the form of games and play. Kindergarten curriculum here is not all that rigorous and I am sure that we will be able to accomplish the basics, even if we don’t do much at all.
Go away. We’re going on an epic vacation this year, and that will be an educational experience unto itself. I’m not sure if this qualifies in the “more sane” category, though.
I’m also working to build an educational experience that I want my daughter to participate in. By the end of the school year, I hope to have created a forest and farm learning program that will take her and other children on an environmental education adventure three mornings a week while I work. It’s just a matter of building it.
Do you work outside the home and homeschool? How do you balance the two?