Tuesday, September 4, 2012

R.I.P Holistic Family Yahoo Group

It is with great sadness that I post this. I have been informed by Beth Sutton of Enki Education that the Holistic Family Yahoo! Groups have been deleted.  The main group, Holistic Family, was founded in 2006 by myself and another Enki Education user, Kari. The entire groups are gone and there are no archives available. For the HF members that means that every word we ever wrote to the group is simply gone. While I have been told that a notice was posted on the main page two days before the deletion, I was not personally given any advanced notice so that I could offer my opinion or choose to try to preserve any of my posts. I think an email would have been the least they could have done.

This is the second time that I have been a member of a Yahoo! group for Enki users that has been deleted.

The Plan (and Some Pre-First Day of Homeschool Excitement)

Since my last post I thought we had come to a decision regarding this coming homeschool year (we'll start the week of the fall equinox). T-Guy wanted to move into grade 8 and to use Oak Meadow, so we ordered that. J-Baby didn't want to use OM7 (we'd already covered the science and history), and while I had written that I would consider moving him into grade 8, once I looked at the OM8 assignments I thought maybe they were more work than he would be willing to do.  Not more than he was capable of, just more than I thought he'd be willing to do. I've tried to make children do more than they want to and I've never found it to work all that well. So I thought we'd piece together our own grade 7, with J-Baby joining T-Guy for the OM math and science.

Yesterday J-Baby brought up the idea of moving into grade 8 (I hadn't offered it as an option). We talked about the level of work required and I mentioned my concerns; he thinks he can do it. It's true that he is a different child than he was just a few months ago, more helpful and more willing to do work. I decided that we'll give it a month or two and if it isn't working out we'll come up with something else.

The decision takes a weight off me; I know what we will be doing academically for the first couple of months. That gives me more time to imagine and plan everything else we will be doing - the Waldorf-y parts of our days. Our festivals, crafts, handwork, cooking/baking, etc.