As a kid, some of my favorite books were the Little House on the Prairie books. I remember daydreaming about what it would be like to be a pioneer who travelled in a covered wagon, made everything from scratch and went to/taught a 1-room school. With the exception of travelling about in a covered wagon, at times, my life feels surprisingly like Laura’s. Or maybe even a bit more cushy, as I have indoor plumbing!
But as an adult, I try to fathom how a 15 year old taught a 1 room school and stayed sane! Now that I have my own “school”, I realize just how difficult it is! Trying to teach just 4 children in different grades each day presents a huge amount of challenges.
This morning, if you had dropped in to visit this is the scene you would have encountered:
I was sitting on the floor in the front room. Julianne was sitting across from me and we were playing a number/counting game to practice recognizing numbers and matching it to the correct number of marbles. Elijah (still in potty-training mode) was running around, pants-less, chasing after marbles, while I tried to keep half an eye on him to see if he needed to use the toilet. At the same time, Justin sat by my side, reading a book out loud to me as I half-listened and tried to talk over vocabulary words he didn’t know how to pronounce or know what they meant. While this was going on, Kaitlyn kept coming into the room with questions about her spelling work. Just an average morning of homeschool at the Taylor house.
Believe me, my romaticized notion of one-room schools have definitely been cured!
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