I’ve been thinking about next years homeschooling plans. One of the things that helps me decide what to use for curriculum is how interested my kids are in it. A friend was showing me  a stack of Sonlight books. They looked great to me, but I called Peace to see her reaction--- “uh, boring” or “can I start reading this right now?”.  I let them look through catalogues and see what they get excited about. Now, I have never seen anyone thrilled over their Saxon math or their spelling or handwriting, but we do those anyway! But with things like Bible, literature—unit studies, science and history, when we’ve worked together to chose something that suits them at the time, everything goes so much better.

Gabriel is really into Lord of the Rings right now. I was thinking about getting a study on it next year, but he practically begged to have it this year—how can I say no? I read the table of contents to him and he kept saying, “oh, I love that, I want to do that.” I’m especially happy to see this response in him, because he’s a little more quiet and it’s easier for me to predict what the girls might like. Then last night, he was looking at a listing of foreign languages offered by Rosetta Stone and he was seeing which countries a few of them were from, and saying he wanted to learn all of them—there was about 20! But what I saw was his eyes light up and that says to me that I better get him started on a language this year.