Later, and I ordered a curriculum on one subject, but it included about sixteen different non-living books from a variety of publishers along with a detailed school schedule. My job as parent and teacher was to follow the schedule and read aloud certain pages from each book every day. The books were colorful and the graphics interesting, but the text was dull, dry and boring. Again, about two weeks into the school year, the realities of life and home education intruded upon my well-laid plans. Just getting through the basics was like slogging through knee-deep mud up hill! Every day I was exhausted by noon. I didn’t have the energy to put in the effort required to follow a complicated schedule that sent us scurrying from one book to another. (Where did those books run off to anyway? They were never where I’d left them.) Honestly, as much as I loved science, my kids needed to learn to read and do math. Science had to become easier, or it wasn’t going to happen. Sigh. Another year without science.

Charlotte Mason warns of the dangers of feeding children dry summaries of facts that would smother and deaden his natural curiosity and destroy his love for learning.

Our mistakes are valuable only if we learn something from them. I discovered that my perfect science course would not only have beautiful graphics, it would be written with an engaging and interesting narrative voice by someone with a clear excitement and passion for the subject—someone who would bring science to life for me as well as for my children. It would consist of a single book I could read from front to back, without jumping around or adhering to a restrictive schedule. My kids and I could cuddle up on the couch and pick up where we left off. Where, oh where, was this science course? The years were passing quickly, and we hadn’t done any science to speak of. Yikes!