First Day (Not) Back

Today was our first day (not) back to school. Gaia would be entering grade 2 & Yemaya a second year of kindergarten. 

We spent the first day of the 2016 school year crafting with friends at their place, in the morning. Gaia created a cardboard land for the my little ponies (they are all obsessed with MLP right now) & the afternoon was spent playing with these. 

Gaia also invented a board game involving the land and ponies (it involved dynamite and a lot of death too #girlswillbegirls). Then Yemaya, Frida, Lenus and I read stories at the library while Gaia had her first dance class for the year. A rather fruitful not-first day back.

 

One of the many reasons homeschooling was the choice for us was a desire for our children to grow up grade-free. It's not reasonable to expect children to be capable of certain feats simply because of their age. It also isn't ideal to segregate children based on age. So it is amusing that every year we do the math and determine what grade they would be in if they were attending one of the local schools. For all my talk, I am a sucker for certain schooly traditions like the first day back snapshot (don't get me started, I've tried talking Eale into speech nights and an unschool Christmas play ;-D). This silly math game we play led to an interesting discussion about individuality in our family.

Life would be very different if we were in the system with Yemaya.  At her age Gaia could have started school, but Yemaya is not school ready, Realising this has made us grateful, once again, to be able to give our children this alternative start to life (it's also made us realise we need to find new ways to support Yemaya's learning that work for her, which will most likely require more involvement from adults outside the family, and stop coasting along expecting she will respond to activities and develop skills the same way her older sister did). If we had been planning to send Yemaya to school, last year would have been very stressful as we tried to get her school ready and find out why she's "behind" her peers. But there's no ticking timebomb, and whether she's "starting school" or "repeating kindergarten" is meaningless, because yesterday is no different from today in our learn-through-living style.