How to End Your Homeschool Year Like a Hippie

Every year since 2002, around the time winter ends and spring’s first blooms starts to color my world, I start browsing Rainbow Resource and HomeschoolReviews.com. Then I pour over a curriculum I have been fascinated with for 12 years, Sonlight. I read good reviews of Sonlight. I research reasons I should never even consider Sonlight. I ponder why there is a HUGE bag of M&Ms in the freezer. I look at all in one schools that you can even have teacher advisory like Oak Meadow, which we used one year and I liked very well without the online teacher.

The thing is, I have to get out of ‘next year’ mode. I start living in the future and then the present year suffers. It has happened year after year. I put and end to my wanderlust this year and chose some wonderful looking materials so that I could get on with my life, our school, and get my brain back. Although while looking up Oak Meadow for this post, I’m back on the fence a little. Also, I may or may not have just now spent 45 minutes looking at Oak Meadows website instead of writing.

After all the inner turmoil, yes I said turmoil, I turned my attention back to this year and we were back on track. Now we only have 4 weeks left and if previous years are any indication, I need to be in full tizzy mode trying to finish everything we started and make the most of the rest of this school year. I mean they are only in 6th grade once, right? We need to pick up speed, plow forward until the end of May, right?

Not necessarily. Yes my brain and motivation were in overdrive but something was still off. And then last weekend I suddenly felt a calm. A calm so cleansing that there was no doubt that I had found the answer. My answer was permission. Somewhere during our busy weekend I gave myself permission not to finish Saxon Math by cramming in 2 lessons a day for the next 20 days. I gave myself permission to put away the Language Arts workbooks that lost their luster around the first of the year. I gave myself permission to end this school year gently and without fanfare.

I realized that my need to accomplish everything before a deadline was partly due to outside pressures and what others think. Well, it’s not that I never care what others think, but about this I don’t. Tuesday I ran into a blog that had words that I needed to hear and confirmation that I am not a bad mom or a bad teacher, 7 Reasons I Don’t Care If You Think I’m A Bad Mom. I’m just not worried about the judgement anymore. The older I get, I realize more and more that some people ‘just stink like poop’.

So that leaves the question ‘what ARE we doing for the next 4 weeks?‘

Finishing the first quilt my daughter will make. Hopefully the first of many. Beautiful colors, don’t you think?

Trying our best to learn some Spanish before we spend 3 weeks in Ecuador this summer. We have Spanish lessons on DVD through Netflix. And this free online course.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j91m55N7e9I We have one more book in Beyond Five in a Row. It’s the one about George Washington Carver. He’s quite interesting.

And just for a little relaxing educational fun we are watching the BBC’s ‘Tales from the Green Valley.‘ We watched episode 3 yesterday and it was quite interesting with the thatching of the roof and the killing of the hog. Each of the 12 episodes are available in full on YouTube.



Watching screens may not be everyone’s idea of hippie but the unstructured, no workbooks, and no test we will be doing during May is certainly my husband’s idea of ‘that hippie homeschool I run’. He calls it that fondly though. We have two successfully functioning adult children as testament to my hippie style of schooling.

Related post- Homeschool-6th Grade in Review