We did some of the last pages of Norah's handwriting book first and she learned to write her numbers before her letters. This wasn't my original plan. We started at the beginning of her Zaner- Bloser Manuscript K book and were dutifully going through the program page by page by page, letter by letter, as the book was so neatly designed. This satisfied my inner perfectionist greatly.

But, I began to notice that as Norah was also progressing forward through her math book, the math problems required her to write numbers in the answer blanks, several numbers a day, in fact, and since she hadn't learned to form her numbers properly yet (they were at the back of the K book) and since she was writing her numbers all wrong and doing that kind of thing over and over and over again, I felt like we had to take a detour and learn how to form the numbers 0-9 correctly. Thus we took a detour during handwriting, left the letters at the front of the book and headed toward end of her book so we could learn how to form her numbers. My inner perfectionist was not pleased, but she went along with this anyway.

Once we learned to form numbers, we eventually went back to letters, picking up where we left off and Norah is now more than halfway through her handwriting book. But, this whole process was a little more than frustrating to me. Like I said, I'm a perfectionist. And, just once, I would like to be able to stick to a plan and finish a workbook from front to the back in order!!!

But, this kind of thing, I am learning, is the beauty of homeschooling and what it so significant about it. We make a plan and begin to follow it, but we take detours as often as is necessary. This way, as we go, we actually tailor the program to fit Norah's needs, making it perfect for her, not perfect for her perfection-loving mother.