The [Brilliant] Solution!

Ugh, I really wanted to finish this post LAST week, so that I'd be just a week behind my original plan, but I just never got around to sitting down and doing it.  ANYWAYS, when we left off almost THREE weeks ago...

...I was saying I've come up with what I feel is a brilliant solution to the problem of not really caring for the public school system and yet not wanting to remove my girls from their school friends, since we wouldn't really be able to replace them with friends from a homeschool group or something similar.  This solution leaves them in public school with their friends, but also does at least a little to address the problem of "real life" skills having been replaced with subjects that aren't at ALL helpful in the formation of responsible adults.

As I was mulling this over and still feeling a little dissatisfied with just leaving things exactly the way they always have been, I suddenly thought, "why couldn't I keep the girls home from school every now and then to do these things with them?"  We used to miss a morning of classes each week the entire school year to attend shops and/or home ec classes (which, of course, aren't part of the curriculum anymore in our province).  Why couldn't I do something like that with my girls at home?

I so totally can!

And so just like that, the solution presented itself.  I talked it over with The Man and he was all for it.  It will be a full day or a half day based on what I'm hoping to accomplish and what's going on at school, but it will roughly average out to two full days each month.  We will work together doing things like cleaning, organizing, baking, cooking, meal-planning, grocery shopping, and in the future, hopefully some hand-crafty-type stuff and/or sewing.  I'd also like to include some service-related ideas from time to time, but haven't figured out any whats, whens, or hows yet!

Certain things like garden work will be determined by weather, but I am generally going to aim for Thursdays, so that if there is homework due to missed school, they'll have the weekend to work on it.  Both girls understand there may be some of that as a result of this decision.  I haven't decided if I'm informing the school or not.  Most friends I've talked to about it say not to bother.  I'm inclined to agree that it probably isn't necessary, and my girls are doing well enough in school that missing an extra two days a month won't hurt them.  But at the same time, I feel like some explanation might be helpful for the teachers, especially in the colder months when I see this thing being a fairly clockwork-like occurrence every other Thursday.

I also haven't really decided if there will be a formal "scope and sequence" for each day or if it will just generally be my routine to-do list for the day done with the girls.  There are a few things I would like to learn better, myself, and those days I see being a little different from usual ~ things like learning how to make perogies, pie crusts, canning, etc.

I also don't know exactly how I am going to tackle the spiritual aspect of this idea, so I'm all ears if you have suggestions.  Because of the time lapse between these days, following a theme will be tough, but if I could find something where each lesson is kind of a stand-alone topic, that would work.  I just purchased Big Truths for Young Hearts by Bruce Ware, but those are larger themes broken up into shorter chapters so I see that being better for a daily thing.  So yeah, it's not like I have this all figured out or anything!!

Two Thursdays ago was our "pilot episode," if you will, but I'll leave that for another post.  It was originally part of this one and that just made it all WAY too long again, but it's already written and scheduled to auto-post, so you know you won't need to wait indefinitely for this one!