Every Waking Hour

I have seven children.

Liam is 21 and a junior at a Catholic college. We started homeschooling when he was in 3rd grade. We started with Seton, which did not work well for him or me. He was a slow worker and it took forever and I always felt like I was pushing him towards production “stop thinking and just DO it!” We found classical education through Laura Berquist’s book and Kolbe Academy, and it worked so great for him and for my teaching style that I thought it was the perfect method Wink. He went on to Thomas Aquinas where he is pulling all A’s. His future choices right now are the monastery or computer game design (quite a fork in the road I know!)

Brendan is 19 and was always a “different learner”. He is having a transition year this year and will probably take some college classes next year and then enroll full time the year after that. We don’t want to rush him out the door. He is a loner and his major emotional connections are with the family and our close friends and relatives. We did a mixture of classical and Design Your Own for him. For instance, he wrote a novel for English in high school, and studied dendrology (trees) extensively for science.

Clare is just 18 and a senior. She mostly designs her own curriculum. Her “multiple intelligence” profile shows particular skills in music, nature, verbal/linguistic and kinesthetic and her life reflects that. She plugs away at Geometry and Chemistry and does quite well but her subjects of choice are literature, language, etc. She plays violin, piano, and classical guitar and does well on all of them.

Sean is 15. He is very kinesthetic. He has excelled in athletics and has a love for football. He is the oldest of the children who was never in school (the three olders all went for a little while in their early years) but he will be going to high school next year in order to play football. I use a sort of Mater Amabilis/Ambleside/classical curriculum for him. The Charlotte Mason component is to help him to slow down and ponder just a bit more than he would do otherwise. The classical component honestly dropped mostly out this year because he disliked Latin so much and it didn’t seem worth persisting when he is going to be taking Spanish next year anyway.

Kieron is 12. I use Mater Amabilis/Ambleside with him and a component of hands-on. Hands-on is SO not my strength so I try to get him to plan various art projects and science demonstrations. We go off and on with this depending on my level of energy and ability to organize, gather etc. He is very bright but has some fine motor problems that affect his writing.

Aidan is almost 9 and developmentally delayed after a stroke. He does late Kindergarten work. In our house Kindergarten adds up to a few minutes of phonics and math a few times a week, read alouds, art supplies and constructive toys to play with, and nature walks. He loves to help in the kitchen and in his Dad’s workshop.

Paddy is 5, quite extroverted compared to the rest of us, a young Kindergartener. He picks up concepts extremely fast but doesn’t seem mature enough to start any kind of formal academics. So we play games and read stories.

IT will be strange for me next year with only 3 students in the homeschool and 2 of them very young. For years most of my planning efforts have been focused on the older set of kids!