Homeschooling blahs

This has been one of my less inspiring homeschooling weeks.  I'm sure the weather has played a huge part.  We all want spring, yet it stubbornly remains below 50 degrees.  Plus, I was a bit consumed with completing home study paperwork which left little brain space for other things.  And then when you add in more than a couple emotionally draining events... well, that leaves you with a pile of workbooks without a lot of creativity.  Bleh.

I know all too well that if I am not feeling excited about what my children are learning, then it's guaranteed that my children are not going to be excited.  Now that I have several things finished up that have been hanging over my head, it's time to go back to focusing on learning.  My typical pattern of doing anything is to throw myself whole heartedly into one project and work on that project in a slightly obsessive way until I become sated and immediately lose all interest.  (Yeah, I know... it's a little pathological.  I do try to work on discipline and moderation.  Really I do.)  I am afraid that I go about teaching my children in the same way and why the unit study approach works so well for us.  It allows us to focus on all aspects of one topic for a concentrated amount of time and then leave it to do something completely different.  In the end we end up learning a whole lot about a lot of different things.  What I find most interesting is how completely disparate things end up relating and informing one another.  I love connecting all our learning together.

All that to say, I think we need to finish up with the South Pacific.  I'm starting to feel a familiar ennui whenever I start to contemplate it.  Plus, we are nearly done reading Kon Tiki.  (I have found is fascinating and highly recommend it.  Did you know there is also a DVD available of actual film footage shot by Thor Heyerdahl from the raft trip?  It was so cool to see the actual things we read about.)  So I think next week we will focus on finishing projects so we can move on to something new.  That means we will be finishing up all our little books and I've wanted to do an art related project as well.  If I'm industrious perhaps I can find some hula music to listen to as we work on our projects.  There, I'm becoming re-energized even as I type this.

But it is the new that draws me.  I love thinking up new projects and learning new things.  I'm just not sure what that is going to be.  We're all consumed with the new bee hive at the moment, perhaps we will do apian studies.