Breaking Up is Hard To Do

**This will be a very long and boring, pour your heart out kind of post so either just X out now or grab you a cup of some strong stuff because we may be here a while.  You can't say I didn't warn you.**

Nobody likes to say goodbye!!  I hate it...especially when I'm saying goodbye to something I really don't want to say goodbye to...like Blue Bell ice cream, Housewives of New Jersey, or Institute for Excellence in Writing....

That's right.  I said it.  Hang me now!!!

We have cut IEW from our school plans for this year!!!!  I cannot believe the words are coming out of my mouth {or should I say from my fingers}.  I have sold so many people on this program its ridiculous.  I have read so much about this program its ridiculous.  I have spent so many hours on the IEW website and yahoo group its ridiculous.  And now we're aren't even going to use it.

Why???  You ask.  Why, if I am so in love with this program are we putting it aside??  

Well, I will just tell you.  

We don't need it!!!

Very complicated answer right???  And now you are thinking, okay, does she think she is raising geniuses or something??  No, I don't.  But the truth of the matter is that right now my girls are pretty good little writers for their ages.  Its not a place where we struggle nor is it a time of the day I dread.  They write every morning in their journals, they write for fun during their quiet time, and now with our new Living Books Curriculum they will be writing narration constantly!!  I just don't see where we need an hour of our day dedicated to a formal writing program right now.

You see, this homeschool thing really gets to your heart in places that you never knew existed.  You go into this thinking that your kids are supposed to do everything public school kids do, they must take the standardized tests that the other "real school kids" take and you spend an hour on every boring and monotonous subject.  Then about half way through the first year something happens.  I realized that we really didn't need to do all that we were doing.  We really didn't need to do 45 worksheets on nouns because guess what...does anybody ever write a sentence without a noun???? EVER???? Somebody answer me because I don't believe in all my years of teaching and parenting have I ever read a sentence that somebody wrote that didn't have a noun in it!!!!  So why on earth am I drilling nouns for weeks??? 

Then I find this Living Books Curriculum that nobody has ever heard of and has no reviews anywhere except for a few people that are the same people who are on their very quiet forum and I FALL IN LOVE!!!  Its all about writing constantly, testing what they do know, not what they don't know, science experiments every day, World History and American History simultaneously, all in 8 weeks of instruction and a week of review and testing.  Its exactly what I have been looking for.  And as I read all of this stuff in the teacher's guide I am learning that 20 minutes per subject is plenty and that if you rotate subjects between fun and boring, everybody will always be interested.  

So, no formal writing program for us this year.  And to boot...I have completely revamped my schedule of our day to follow what Charlotte Mason and LBC recommends and I could not be happier.  I feel like this is where we belong.  We will be done by lunch and my kids will have learned more in the 5 hours of school this year than they have learned every year up to this point combined!!!  And the best part is half the time they won't even realize they are learning because we are just reading and painting and listening to the orchestra and chasing invertebrates in the "out of doors" as Mrs. Mason would call it!!  And writing about all of it!!!  

So IEW, I must put you aside for this year.  Who knows maybe next year we will come back for you.  Or we may be unschooling by then...at the rate I'm going :) 

I hope that you are getting ready for your year and learning all kinds of things you didn't know about yourself and your school!!!!

Here is our new schedule...