Judgement. ~ It stinks to be on the receiving end. It is even worse when you suddenly realize that you are the one guilty of judging.
My Interactive Notebooking post received a lot of attention on a few homeschooling forums, and I need to set the record straight.
I seem to be getting a lot of credit for being extremely organized and doing a lot of preparation. Here’s the truth – most of my inspiration comes straight from our textbooks.
Confession time: At the beginning of our homeschooling journey I haughtily declared that our experience would be nothing like B&M schools. -No workbooks. -No textbooks. -No lecture. -No flashcards. -Nothing like what I remember. We would snuggle on the couch reading classics, and all of our lessons would include hands-on fun.
I was wrong, Guess what works well for my kids?
Yup, our homeschool uses elements of all those things I claimed we would “never” use. You can see our full curriculum list, but here is the short version: We have found a perfect fit in Bob Jones math and language arts textbooks (I know, I know, but it works really well for us). We use the Barton method of flashcards combined with AAS for great spelling success, and my oldest is an auditory learner who loves lectures. We even go to hear local professors in our free time.
See the trend? I was wrong about everything I said I would “never” do. Okay, so we do a huge amount of snuggling/reading and hands-on activities too, and the workbooks are tweaked to fit our needs, but that doesn’t mean that I was right.
Should everyone use workbooks? No. Neither are they inherently evil. Printed materials don’t have to stop our creativity – they can give us the freedom to get creative without having to re-create the wheel.
Proverbs 16:18 – Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.
Praying that confession softens the blow of that fall.
