This week we are participating in Home Education Week. The task for Monday was

Describe yourself, your family or one of your children. What is it like to be home educated in your family? What is “normal” for you?

But my homework is late.

I thought it would be fun to have my family join me in blogging. My 8-year-old was the first to sign up, and she wanted the first day all to herself. This child is so like me that it can be a little frightening. I see the mistakes I’ve made and want to shield her from them. She wants to be her own person, and I struggle to let her go and do just that.

Perhaps the area where she is most like me is in her eagerness to jump right in to any project. For her 8th birthday, I got her a book about embroidery with iron-on transfers. She confidently asked me to transfer every picture in the book onto one pillowcase so she could finish all of them in one afternoon. That is totally something I would do myself. I convinced her to do just one at a time, so she is working on a little blue owl.

I tricked this child into reading last week by giving her a biography of Helen Keller and telling her to only read 4 pages. She is nearly finished, and we spent some time looking up additional facts on the computer. My daughter wants to be on the computer, wants to do what I’m doing. She wants to write.

She pestered me about it yesterday. She doesn’t completely understand what it means that her words will appear to anyone who looks at them on their own computer, but she was content to know that her friend Emily would be able to see.

After promising to write my first guest blog, this child of mine did exactly what I do after I’ve committed to something. She fretted.

Finally, she sat down to write about homeschooling. She labored over each word, insisting that she had to type it all herself. This is all she had to say:

The thing I like about homeschooling is that I am learning the states.

That was it. Hours of agony for one sentence.

Every day she and her father look at a map. She gets a printout and fills in information about each state. They started with California and she is working her way eastward. And my little geography girl loves it. One day I didn’t know where to find Oregon–well, I could find it on a map, just couldn’t find the printed page for her–and she was really worried until Dad came home and saved the day.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.