We’ve scheduled our first homeschooling assessment. It’s only a week and a half away. I’m very nervous.
In case you’re not familiar with homeschooling, this is the end of the year assessment where we sit down with a certified teacher and she reviews Gage’s “portfolio” of work for the year. She then tells us if it’s satisfactory or not and off we go. Sounds harmless enough, eh? Sounds like it should be easy, right?
But this is the first one we’ve ever done. So I have no idea what to expect or what to take. I don’t know what is going to come out of Gage’s mouth when she asks him what he’s been up to this year. I’m just nervous.
I’m ultra disorganized. To be honest, I don’t have a portfolio. I have papers stuffed into cabinets here and there and I’ve yet to pull it all together to see where we are. We tend to unschool, which means we follow Gage’s lead in our educational pursuits. He likes trains, so we get lots of train books (reading, spelling) and go to various places to ride trains (history, geography) and we let him play with software that lets him set up train systems and run them (cognitive abilities)...heck we even try to work trains into math (remember those story problems where train A leaves Boston at 10:00 a.m. travelling at 50 mph and...?). So we don’t use any one curriculum or have a set of workbooks we can take with us to show what we’ve been doing.

A part of me feels such pressure to put on a good show. But that’s not the point of this whole thing. The POINT is that we’re letting Gage be the master of his destiny, we’re letting him choose the path of his education. We’re getting to be involved, we’re getting to see those lightbulb moments (and the lightbulb blowing out and sparking and catching the whole house on fire moments...er..those not so great moments). We’re not homeschooling to show someone else what we’re capable of, we’re homeschooling so that Gage can discover what he’s capable of. So I need to stop worrying. I’m sure it will be fine. I’m sure it will...