“If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll never get there”.
For my older children, I have made definite homeschooling goals… what books I’d like to have completed before the beginning of December (baby’s due date)… and then I figured out how many pages of this book needs to be read each day, or how many lessons/units per week, or whatever, and then I make up all the daily assignment sheets for that time and check them off each day (planning for holidays or other breaks too of course). It is the most effective way for us, because it keeps me on schedule and motivated to make sure that schoolwork is getting done each day. I do it in pencil, so I can easily modify it if I discover ‘the plan’ just isn’t working for a particular subject.
For my 5yob, my goal is that he can read some simpler phonics readers before he turns 6 (in April), and that he knows some simple math (adding/subtracting to 10) and his numbers to 100.
For my 3yob, before he turns 4 in May '10, my goal is that he can read at least a couple of hundred words (will start using Doman method shortly), and that hopefully he is perhaps starting to be able to figure out how the reading thing ‘works’ (to intuit some understanding of phonics)… most important, I want to foster a love of reading in him, as opposed to a love of video games like my 5yob is starting to get. Also, I hope that I can get him to feel comfortable in water that is past his knee height!
For my 11 month old baby I hope that he will be able to start reading independently (some short children’s books) by the time he turns 3. I hope he will love, love, love reading and love to learn new things and do so quickly and easily.
For the four youngest children (5yob, 3yob, 11mob, baby due in December), I hope that I can teach them to understand, speak, and read in French even before ‘school age’ (and hopefully Dutch too, but I will start with French mainly because of amount of materials available and to build my own confidence), so that they will not be moaning like my older kids do when I tell them that French has to be part of their curriculum (because all the kids in school learn French, and we live in Canada where knowing French could help them get better jobs later on).
In general my goal is to teach my younger children (reading and languages in particular) at a much earlier age than I did the older ones so that homeschooling will be much easier and less time consuming later on, and so that I am catching the opportunity to teach them these things when their brain is learning the fastest and they are the most interested in learning. For my 9yob, who is still ‘learning to read’ (although it is coming along well now), it is a chore that he doesn’t really enjoy doing at all, but because he is old enough to see the value and necessity of if, he is perfectly cooperative. No, I really want learning to read to be FUN, so I will teach them earlier from now on.
