The Basics

I can type for eight billion years, babbling on and on about knitting, math and science, homeschooling schedules, favorite books, television, movies, the pros and cons of standardized testing, but faced with a great big blank blog... well I've been sitting here for two hours now staring at the screen and going uhhhhhhhhhh. Mind you I was also watching TV, eating a candy bar (3 musketeers mint! woohoo!), changing the laundry, feeding the cat.... Okay so I'm typing now.

We homeschool, and in homeschooling circles one is expected to have a "style" or "method" that one adheres to, if only so that you can decide which messageboards you're going to frequent and which you're going to troll when you're bored. I don't have a proper homeschooling method... all the unschoolers think I'm terribly school-at-home and all the school-at-homers think I'm a lazy bum who ought to be able to stick to her own schedule. Our homeschool style is more along the lines of "Ooh look something shiny!" On the plus side, we have very interesting days -- you never know how it's going to go! But on the minus side I can't find our spelling book. Actually two of them. I think we had three at last count, and I'm sure they'll turn up when I least expect it. But going back to the plus side (I really like the plus side -- much cheerier!), one gets so many more interesting ideas when one is forced to think on ones feet, as it were.

There's this popular image of the homeschool mom, serene and organized, leading her little ones in a poetry study over tea... That's not us. Our homeschool is something more in the line of DS lobbing questions over the bunker at me like so many hand grenades -- "Well what was there before the big bang?" "All the numbers added up together can't be infinity because infinity isn't a number and if it's not a number it can't be the sum of numbers!" "Can I get a pet bird? I read a book about them" -- and me alternately ducking: "We'll look it up at the library next time we go" or firing back: "Alright smartypants, how about you just sit down and start adding up all the numbers and see if it doesn't take you an infinite amount of time, eh? And birds are noisy!"

So for all those metaphorical grenades flying around our house (explains the mess anyway) I'm sure a handful are duds, but there have been a few live ones, and I promise I'll share. Math and science are the favorites around here, but that won't stop me from weighing in on anything else that catches my eye.