Happy New Year

Welcome back to the blog! We’ve had a long period of absence on the blog because, as I’ve discovered, the task of raising kids who are active, engaged learners leaves little down time! Combined with normal “life” activities, keeping up with my goals for fostering an atmosphere of creative exploration takes untold amounts of time and energy. So does writing about it. In the end, I spent more time doing and much less time reflecting and writing. However, life has changed significantly in the past six months. Annie began school at the beginning of the year, but before the winter break, we decided to pull her out of our neighborhood kindergarten and to begin homeschooling her. As I’ve considered how to homeschool, and more importantly how to do it thoughtfully and purposefully, I concluded that more reflection on our activities was necessary–by myself and by my daughters.

This is where the blog comes in. As I begin this journey as a homeschooling parent, I want to take time to reflect on what I’m doing, why I’m doing it, and if it’s working for me and for my daughter.I’m not sure how long we’ll be working this way. When we decided to remove Annie from her school, we did so with the intention of placing her in a parochial school as soon as a space becomes available. That may be this year, but it may not happen until the next school year. I’ve been working on an explanation of how and why we made our decision, but that will probably appear later. It was not a sudden decision, but rather something we arrived at after months of trying to make something fit that simply wasn’t right for our child.

So, we’ve made a clean break. Annie is excited about what she calls “Mommy School.” She’s laid out a list of things she wants to study: the colonial period of American history (including Felicity, the American Girl stories about that time); Western expansion (in light of the Laura Ingalls Wilder series of novels, which she has listened to on CD); the lifecycle of various animals including frogs, butterflies, and penguins; and fitness and nutrition. When I asked her what she wanted to study, these were her answers, and given that they’re interesting, compelling areas, I’d like to honor those. We’ll add to that some of the other kinds of things we’ve been doing this year, revisiting field trips from the summer and from this past winter break. Annie and I have also become subscribers to Imagination Stage in Bethesda, where we’ve been following each of their plays and their respective books. Also, we’ve just returned from a trip to Philadelphia where we explored the Please Touch museum for the second time, the National Constitution Center and the Liberty Bell on Independence Mall, and Adventure Aquarium in Camden, NJ. I’d like to find a way to include all of these in her portfolio.

2009 was filled with adventure. We did manage to make it to almost every one of the items on our initial list. We’ll continue to make our way through that list and to add more as we go this year. I’m looking forward to our new challenge. As exhausting as it has sometimes been to take 2 or more children on day-long adventures so frequently, the energy expenditure pays in dividends. I’m looking forward to sharing more of those with my daughters and with you in 2010.

I wish you equally exciting challenges and adventures…