Since I will be writing about homeschooling quite a bit, I thought it might be a good idea to give a little background about our homeschool style and what we have done in our homeschool over the years. R is 10 now, almost 11. We have homeschooled since the very beginning. She has never been in public school, and I don't regret a moment of it! Some people might say the "messiness" of our lives extends into our homeschool. I am very much an eclectic homeschooler, and lean more towards unschooling. Those boxed all-in-one curriculums have just never been a good fit for us. I have a background in education. My college degree was elementary education. When R came along, I was working part-time as a receptionist at a doctor's office, and I had been doing a lot of subbing in the school systems. I knew what the public schools were like, and as R grew, I didn't feel like public school would be a good fit for her. Here's the funny thing, for a lot of years, I said I wou...
One of those things that I struggle with as a mom is too much screen time. Too much screen time for me, too much screen time for R. I want to get off the screens and get outside in the fresh air. So, this year we started a 1000 Hours Outside challenge. I printed off a beautiful tracking page from the 1000 Hours Outside website. We are off to a really slow start. April is almost over, and we haven't even made it to our first 100 hours yet! We aren't even to 50 hours yet. Yikes. A lot of our April hours came from a Saturday that we spent at Pokagon State Park, one of our local state parks. It was a beautiful day! We are definitely anxious to go back. I have a really hard time motivating myself to go outside when it's cold. My depression kicks in, and I just want to curl up inside with my phone or with a book. I'm hoping that this summer we will be outside more. We have a vacation coming up, and I plan to spend a lot of time outside that week. We will be at an amusement ...