Mission: massive train track city... Or not.

Today was homeschool group's Learn Through Play. The goal: building a massive train track city using wooden tracks, blocks, and lincoln logs. The result: a generously sized figure 8, built by one of the moms, which is quickly demolished as the kids get interested in books, cars, play kitchen, plastic animals, etc. Well, at least they listened to the story and played with the trains for a few minutes first...

For some people, this change of direction might have been hard to deal with. I mean, we planned and setup for building a train city and now they don't want to play with it?! For us, we decided a long time ago to just roll with the activity changes our kids make. The main goal of Learn Through Play is to provide an opportunity for our kids to learn something while we all build relationships with other homeschoolers. Mission accomplished.

While our kids played together, us moms shared resources and support. C shared an online shopping resource with us, SmallHands.com, a Montessori-style learning toy store. I will be thoroughly "researching" christmas and birthday gifts on this site in the very near future. We also discussed our struggles in finding other consistent homeschooling families to join our group.

We often get families that will join us for a week or two and then they get flakey, cancelling at the last minute or falling off the face of the earth. In my time as a homeschooling family (a little over a year at this point), I've found this seems to be an ongoing struggle with almost every family I've met. I understand that part of the benefit of homeschooling is the flexibility of your schedule, but Come On! A little consistency and reliability would be nice! Flakey people drive me nuts! (end rant)