Home School

The year is nearly over for this home school mom.

Hallelujah.

Maybe it's been my attitude that made this school year not the most enjoyable. Maybe it's been the attitude of my little girl (which was likely a direct result of my attitude). Maybe it's been....

I don't know what it's been, but I'm so very thankful to announce that we have a mere four weeks til this school year is over.

Over.

Except I know that it's not really over. Every mom is a home school mom even if she doesn't use books. Every mom teaches her children life long skills even if they head out the door to school every morning.

Anyway.

We're almost done. School here lately ALMOST has me wishing that we weren't quite done yet. Almost, but not quite.

Addie has been doing absolutely great. She loves to see what the lesson is for the day. She loves to pull out her pencil, sharpen it up, and scrawl her name at the top of the page. She loves to read the little stories that she reads every Friday. "Sam hit the ball. See Sam run. Sam can run fast."

When I think back to how school started at the beginning of the year, I about cry. Nearly every day she was in tears because she just couldn't do it (so she said). Several days she sat at her desk all day, literally, because she declared she wasn't going to do her work, and I declared she WAS going to.

It was pretty much a battle of the wills. She just about won.

I declared to Jason several times that I was done. And I would be for about a week. Then I'd start feeling bad about my sweet little girl not getting her education and back to the books we would go. A month later, we'd do the same thing.

The five week trip to Russia seemed to be the turning point. We didn't do school at all in the couple weeks before we left home and only did two weeks worth the whole time we were in Russia. Til we finally got back into the daily school routine, she was begging to do three or more lessons a day. I had to hold her back.

Now? She is able to recognize all the letters and can even read simple stories. She knows most of her colors (I know, she's six so she should know them, but you will never know what a huge feat that was. We started the color learning thing when we first brought them home in 2008 and she flat-out was not interested in learning that. There was far too much else to learn at that point.). When she first started in kindergarten last fall she only knew a few colors. Blue and red and sometimes, pink.

She knows many of her numbers, though we still get lots of laughs at her expense. Just the other day she was trying to tell me what the number '22' was. She sat there for several long moments staring at her paper like it was going to speak to her. She glanced at me with a sheepish grin. She looked back at her paper. She glanced at me. She looked back at her paper. Finally, I felt sorry enough for her to give her a hint....'Twen..' She burst out, "I KNEW IT. I KNEW it wasn't twoty-two! I just couldn't think what else it could be." :)

At least I have learned to laugh about it now. I admit, there are still times when the laughing is nowhere near the surface of my attitude. There are times when I could scream simply because she forgets that 'b' is not the same as 'd'. That 'm' is not the same as 'n'. That 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'z', and 'g' don't all sound exactly the same. It gets frustrating, but then I have to think back to the beginning and remember just how far she has come in just eight short months.

What a miracle.