As a blogger – one of my main goals is to be transparent with our homeschooling through Middle and High School.

• I have a couple of really fun reviews coming up that I’m excited about. 
• We have had 3 months of really fun Nature study with Weather, Rocks and this month Birds.
• We love to share our adventures at the beach.
• And share our beautiful property that we rent on the Lake with you.

What happens when something like this shows up in a notebook:

Though my photographs, one might get the idea that we are just lucky. That my boys are some rare breed of homeschoolers that actually like school more than most.  What the photographs and little blurbs can’t tell, are the hard tired mornings. The counter full of dishes. The flowerbeds that need turned over. The battle with the Raccoons and Gophers over the yard. Piles of raincoats and shoes by the door.

Want to know where that note started?

Vocabulary words.  We’ve been working through a new set of vocabulary words that I’ll share with you this month and Nate continues on with his Marie’s Words for SAT practice.

We have been focusing on writing out the words, definitions, using the words in every day life. Trying to bring those words into our conversations. Yesterday – the youngest finished the last word in the set. He was triumphant.

Then I noticed him writing on the bottom of the page. I teased him about how happy he was to be finished, as we are going to go through the words again – and warned him not to be too overjoyed.  He responded – “Oh ya. This is for a review. I have to really know this stuff.” Then he started writing again.

I have to say I was a little sad. I said – “Really? You really didn’t like our project?  Don’t you like being able to describe things better??” Oh no, he assured me. He loves the vocabulary cards.  He just doesn’t like writing.  And he was being silly. I took a photo of his entry.  And he looked at me horrified.  “Are you really going to put that on your blog?”

Yes. Yes I am.  Sharing that we not only have fun relaxed learning unschooling times of walking at the beach while holding clipboards. Sharing that Notebooking is fun for me, but is also still a lot of work, just different than worksheets. Sharing that there is work in putting the vocabulary words in use almost the same amount of work we put into phonograms and multiplication tables. And that the DOING of it – is rarely overly fun. But the results – are fantastic.

When he knew I was serious he re-wrote it for the blog. Ha. I thought he’d take out the middle sentence and change the word hate. I thought he’d change it to “I don’t like writing.”  But – that’s transparency for ya.

So- on my next few posts of fun notebooking, vocabulary reviews, history re-caps, beach adventures and birding counts – realize we really are human, raising middle school boys with a lot of personality!