We decide to Homeschool

We haven't been happy with the schools here, in fact they are really rough!  Several of my kids had been begging me to home school and after I decided to do it I felt so much peace.  I was pretty nervous, initially, because Anni seemed like the wild card in the whole thing.  She is pretty time consuming at this age.  I felt so good about it, though, that we moved forward with plans and I started really using my teaching degree for the first time, haha.  I wanted to do a lot of thematic units, so we started on one about the ocean, because we had planned a trip to the ocean right after school started.

Our coral reef:

Soon all of our curriculum began arriving and it was amazing!:

I couldn't believe the sheer amount of it all!  Shawn built us some shelving just to hold all of it and also a table to work around in our school area:

I have really liked the curriculum and think it's covering everything really well, but I don't like how it keeps us so busy that we don't have time to do much of the "fun" stuff like the coral reef (above) now.  I love having the kids around me and teaching them every day even though it is a full-time job.  The kids have really stepped it up and they have jobs that we all work on for an hour every morning so that the house stays clean since I don't have much time to work on it.  Then we start school with me reading aloud, which we all love.  One thing I really like about homeschooling is that we have a flexible schedule.  If we know we will be traveling somewhere or have some sports events coming up that will be during school hours, we get ahead in school in preparation for the event.  This isn't something that we plan to do forever, but for this year, right now, it works!  I think we will have good memories of this time spent learning together.