heaven sent

it's been almost 3 years since i pulled the kids out of public school. (yes they spent 3 months in public school between then and now. i'm not quite ready to discuss that publicly yet.) when i first brought them home, i thought i'd done my research. i thought i had found a great method that fit my philosophies; one that would provide them some freedoms they hadn't known in public school. little did i know that it wouldn't suit them and that this homeschooling journey would be one of constant change. there were so many things i was unprepared for. it's like having your first child. you get a gazillion pieces of advice while you're pregnant but until you go through the experience yourself, there's just no way you can comprehend what anyone is telling you or imagine what it will truly be like. well after that first year of floundering and not really liking the program i had chosen, i discovered this:

this is a nice clean picture of the exciting 3rd edition that is to be released any day now. my version is without jacket and all beat up and full of bookmarks. i've often heard converts to our church say that as they heard the missionaries teach them, it was like they knew those things all along. this is how i feel about the philosophies in this book. when i first read this book, it was as if i already knew the concepts. i just never knew how to verbally communicate them or put them together in that way. everything i read just made perfect sense to me. i understood the why. i could picture the how. i now use this as the baseline for all that i do in our homeschooling world. the book is insanely comprehensive and there's no way i could do it all. and of course, a book is not a be-all/end-all. minor adjustments always need to be made along the way. the book even suggests it. and no one knows better than God what each child needs anyway.

i have a love/hate relationship with homeschooling. who knows if it will always be that way. but i am hugely grateful for this book, and the friends (you know who you are) who introduced me to it. for those of you who would like to know more about it, and the mother/daughter team that wrote it, visit THE WELL-TRAINED MIND. it's definitely a cyberspace pitstop worth perusing.