Lights, garland, candles, Little People Nativity, Jesus Storybook Bible & various renditions of the story of Jesus' birth ---- we use these things to help prepare us as we anticipate the coming of our Savior.
Showing posts with label Decisions. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Decisions. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
December Photo Project :::: 12.7.11 :::: Anticipation
Lights, garland, candles, Little People Nativity, Jesus Storybook Bible & various renditions of the story of Jesus' birth ---- we use these things to help prepare us as we anticipate the coming of our Savior.
Friday, April 23, 2010
Oh, So That’s What They Call It...
Where We Began
I do admit that when Aidan started Kindergarten my goal was to do school at home, I thought that was how you were “suppose” to homeschool. I wanted to teach him, I wanted to be a teacher. I decided that we would do a language arts and math curriculum and do “unit studies” based on what we were interested in. Our first unit study topic was discovered on a warm day at College Cove Beach in Trindad. Aidan spent the entire day tide pooling. He was enthralled with seeing, touching and smelling new things. So we spent the next few weeks learning about tide pools and oceans. I kept telling myself when he gets a little older we will do “real” science and social studies.
Where The Change Happened
I realized all my children would not be exactly like one another. Some will read at 5 and others not until 8 or later. Some will love workbooks and eat up anything that is “doing school”, others will prefer to not pick up a pencil unless it is to create a sling shot. Aidan was an easy one to “teach” to read, he picked up BOB Books and never turned back, Sing Spell Read & Write was the highlight of his day. He loved to learn sounds and put them together. Looking back I was not teaching him, he was ready to learn and needed guidance. Coda isn’t interested in reading yet. Could I sit with him for hours a day drilling and draining him, yes I could. What would that accomplish? In 20 years will it matter if he began to read at 5 or 7 or even 10?
And then last August we began traveling full time. We spent afternoons and weekends exploring new places and meeting new people. I realized how much we would be missing out on if we were at home doing school for all those hours. We’ve been to farms, citrus groves and gone hiking in parks. We’ve gone swimming in the ocean and watched dolphins chase each other. We’ve experience sunsets over the ocean and in the desert. We’ve been to museums, aquariums and zoos. We’ve made new friends, we’ve visited best friends. We have experienced and learned the richness of life and of this world.
Where We Are Now
We don’t sit down and do school on a daily basis. I have stepped down from the role of the teacher and come along side my children so that we are able to learn together. We still have workbooks and curriculums that are accessible and we use them when the interest is there. We spend time reading, a lot of time reading. We explore and learn about wherever we happen to be. We take time to soak it all in. Our day does not have specific time set aside for learning, instead we learn all day. We learn on weekends and in the summertime. If one of us is really interested in something, we learn more about it, whether that be Star Wars, cursive writing, princesses or knot tying.
I always hesitate to put myself in a box. I just don’t like the feeling, I get all claustrophobic and ache to get out. I am not trying to be without an opinion; I just want to be open to others. So I’ve tried not to put a label on homeschooling philosophy. I would tell people we homeschooled but just took a more relaxed approach, I guess I'd call us kind of eclectic. But as I have learned how huge of an unschooling community there is out there and how vast the differences are in each one of those families and how accepting it seems to be, I feel a sense of pride and freedom in saying that we are unschoolers. Not saying we will be able to be labeled unschoolers forever (I have some commitment issues), but I will ALWAYS commit to doing what is best for my children and our family, right now its unschooling for all of us. Who knows what the future holds...the only thing I can expect is change.
I have been brewing this post for quite awhile and then with the media coverage that unschooling has gotten in the past week, I was going to hold off. BUT, I am in an exciting place right now, learning more and more each day about unschooling, my children and the world. I feel like a kid again, like I can enjoy life. Given the fact that we traditionally homeschooled for sometime, we are all still adjusting to being free from lessons and assessments, something called deschooling. Some days the children want to do "school" so we pull out the workbooks and curriculum and I let them choose what they want to work on. The sense of pride in their learning is astounding when it is theirs from the beginning; they chose what they will learn, they learn it and now they can choose to move onto something else or continue.
Here are some of the online unschooling resources that have been invaluable to me:
Child’s Play
Sandra Dodd
Walk Slowly, Live Wildly
Can A Christian Be An Unschooler
Unschooling.com
I do admit that when Aidan started Kindergarten my goal was to do school at home, I thought that was how you were “suppose” to homeschool. I wanted to teach him, I wanted to be a teacher. I decided that we would do a language arts and math curriculum and do “unit studies” based on what we were interested in. Our first unit study topic was discovered on a warm day at College Cove Beach in Trindad. Aidan spent the entire day tide pooling. He was enthralled with seeing, touching and smelling new things. So we spent the next few weeks learning about tide pools and oceans. I kept telling myself when he gets a little older we will do “real” science and social studies.
Where The Change Happened
I realized all my children would not be exactly like one another. Some will read at 5 and others not until 8 or later. Some will love workbooks and eat up anything that is “doing school”, others will prefer to not pick up a pencil unless it is to create a sling shot. Aidan was an easy one to “teach” to read, he picked up BOB Books and never turned back, Sing Spell Read & Write was the highlight of his day. He loved to learn sounds and put them together. Looking back I was not teaching him, he was ready to learn and needed guidance. Coda isn’t interested in reading yet. Could I sit with him for hours a day drilling and draining him, yes I could. What would that accomplish? In 20 years will it matter if he began to read at 5 or 7 or even 10?
And then last August we began traveling full time. We spent afternoons and weekends exploring new places and meeting new people. I realized how much we would be missing out on if we were at home doing school for all those hours. We’ve been to farms, citrus groves and gone hiking in parks. We’ve gone swimming in the ocean and watched dolphins chase each other. We’ve experience sunsets over the ocean and in the desert. We’ve been to museums, aquariums and zoos. We’ve made new friends, we’ve visited best friends. We have experienced and learned the richness of life and of this world.
Where We Are Now
We don’t sit down and do school on a daily basis. I have stepped down from the role of the teacher and come along side my children so that we are able to learn together. We still have workbooks and curriculums that are accessible and we use them when the interest is there. We spend time reading, a lot of time reading. We explore and learn about wherever we happen to be. We take time to soak it all in. Our day does not have specific time set aside for learning, instead we learn all day. We learn on weekends and in the summertime. If one of us is really interested in something, we learn more about it, whether that be Star Wars, cursive writing, princesses or knot tying.
I always hesitate to put myself in a box. I just don’t like the feeling, I get all claustrophobic and ache to get out. I am not trying to be without an opinion; I just want to be open to others. So I’ve tried not to put a label on homeschooling philosophy. I would tell people we homeschooled but just took a more relaxed approach, I guess I'd call us kind of eclectic. But as I have learned how huge of an unschooling community there is out there and how vast the differences are in each one of those families and how accepting it seems to be, I feel a sense of pride and freedom in saying that we are unschoolers. Not saying we will be able to be labeled unschoolers forever (I have some commitment issues), but I will ALWAYS commit to doing what is best for my children and our family, right now its unschooling for all of us. Who knows what the future holds...the only thing I can expect is change.
I have been brewing this post for quite awhile and then with the media coverage that unschooling has gotten in the past week, I was going to hold off. BUT, I am in an exciting place right now, learning more and more each day about unschooling, my children and the world. I feel like a kid again, like I can enjoy life. Given the fact that we traditionally homeschooled for sometime, we are all still adjusting to being free from lessons and assessments, something called deschooling. Some days the children want to do "school" so we pull out the workbooks and curriculum and I let them choose what they want to work on. The sense of pride in their learning is astounding when it is theirs from the beginning; they chose what they will learn, they learn it and now they can choose to move onto something else or continue.
Here are some of the online unschooling resources that have been invaluable to me:
Child’s Play
Sandra Dodd
Walk Slowly, Live Wildly
Can A Christian Be An Unschooler
Unschooling.com
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Welcome Home!
The renovations began the day we bought our home on wheels in January. While the guys at Family RV in San Jose, CA finished up the details with Nick, I was inside ripping the boarder off the walls. We weren't able to go full force into renovating because we were due in Southern California the next day for Nick's job. But oh my, the wheels in our brains were turning non-stop. We had so many ideas, plans and dreams of how we wanted the trailer to look when it was all finished. Just like any home there are always things to update, but for the most part we are FINISHED with the trailer renovations. Thanks to a lull in work for Nick we were able to finish renovating while we were in Eureka visiting family and friends.
Life in the trailer is different then life in a house. But life in our trailer is life in our HOME. We feel at home, we each have our own space, our routines and we are all thriving in this new environment.
Here are the details:
2003 Keystone Sprinter 303BHS
30 feet long / 8 feet wide
One Slide Out
Quad Bunks and Queen Bed
40 gal Water Tank
40 gal Grey Tank
30 gal Black Tank
4500 QuietPac Generator
Air Conditioner/Heater
Towed with a 2001 Chevy Express 3500
Things we've done so far:
Painted all walls
Changed hardware from brass to silver
Put up our own curtains
Added Memory Foam Mattress Topper to queen bed
Two new light fixtures in living area
Installed 24" flat screen tv and slim line DVD player
Removed hide-a-bed in couch, replaced with under couch storage
Removed some carpet in living area, exposing clean linoleum underneath
Added baskets, hooks and other storage
Removed night stand in master bedroom and replaced with taller cabinet
Take a tour of our home here.
Make sure you check our the captions, I have added lots of little details in them.
Special thanks to Sara & Matt over at Happy Janssen's for inspiring us in our life on the road adventure.
Saturday, January 23, 2010
The Road to Being on the Road
Six months ago Nick was working in Washington then Alaska, I was in Eureka with five children (one of which was a 3 week old preemie). We knew that God did not want our family to live separate lives. So what did we do, we gave notice on our rental home, sold a ton of stuff, gave away even more, put a little in storage and packed a cargo van with our belongings. We spent the next 4 ½ months in Santa Paula, CA in a furnished apartment. The apartment was good to us, but it wasn’t ours, it didn’t feel like home. It seems like we had been forever dreaming of traveling the country as a family, but the dream became somewhat tangible about a year and a half ago when we met our wonderful friends, The Janssen’s, an awesome inspiring full-time traveling family. They lit a fire in us, however we didn’t have a job that would allow for us to travel and we weren’t independently wealthy, so honestly we never thought our dream would become a reality. And truly, could we actually do it, could we travel the country in an RV with 5 children 7 and under? But now we had the job, we just needed the RV.
We left Southern California to spend a few weeks with family over Christmas. When we arrived we were in a difficult place, one that I do ever want to be in again, that place where everything is uncontrollable that you just freeze, there are so many huge decisions to make that you can’t even decide what to eat for dinner. We had no idea if we were going back to furnished apartments, if we were going to rent a house in Eureka and Nick would travel without us or if by some miracle we could find an RV that would work for us and we could travel as a family. We didn’t want to do the apartment thing, it is a stressful task to arrive somewhere and find a furnished apartment that will allow 5 children and not be thousands of dollars a month. We didn’t want to live apart, I mean we just changed our entire life 4 ½ months earlier because we wanted to be together. We spent hours upon hours trying to find the right home on wheels. We are a family of 7 and don’t have unlimited funds, so our options were slim. But as God would plan it, just when we thought we would never be able to find the right RV, He put one right in front of us.
Photos of our time in Santa Rosa, CA here.
Photos of our time in Humboldt, December 2009 here.
Photos of our time in Santa Rosa, CA here.
Photos of our time in Humboldt, December 2009 here.
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