As I write, it is the start of the Jewish festival of Rosh haShanah, Jewish new year, and so I thought that now would be a good time to write an update on the new education year.
In the end, we took 8 weeks off over the summer, the longest we have ever taken, I think. This is one of the issues with home educating and dealing with chronic illness: the best laid plans can only ever be provisional and may be subject to change or cancelation or postponement. On the other hand, we have that freedom and flexibility to be able to react appropriately to circumstances without necessarily needing to ‘miss school’. We are always located where the resources are available, for example.
We finished our holiday at the Home Service Christian home educators’ holiday at Cefn Lea in Wales. We missed the conference this year for the first time. I love the conferences but they double the price of the holiday, and it does always seem to be the same old people saying the same old things, so we gave it a miss.
Starting up again has been a big challenge. We are 3 weeks in now, and still not into a good routine. I had planned to break the day up into 3 sections: Morning Time, Table Lessons and Afternoon Meeting. So far this hasn’t worked very well. I don’t want to give up on the idea just yet though, so we will keep trying for a little while at least.
We are also planning to do a 3-4 weeks on, 1 week off program through the year, so we are due for a week off to coincide with the Jewish harvest festival of Sukkot.
Later, I will post a list of the subjects we are doing and the main resources we’re using.
Little Bears Home Education 