New Year

It's a new year here, which for us means some switch-up in curriculum (we go year round, but are most likely to start new stuff in July/august or January). This is the first year that my little guy won't be moving up a grade in January. He started K on his 5th birthday, and it has generally made the most sense to keep promoting him then. In things like reading and writing, he's plateaued a bit, and will finish out the regular school year as a 5th grader. He has a lot of non-academic stuff on his plate this semester -- testing for his black belt in TaeKwonDo from March to May and starting Boy Scouts.

Our curriculum now looks like this:

Older ds: continuing Miller-Levine Biology with the Kolbe syllabus -- he and older dd will be taking an intensive lab course in March (overlapping little brother's black belt testing).

Cooking -- not sure what we're going to be doing. He's almost finished with the classroom part of Rouxbe cooking school, but needs some practice.

Geometry -- he did some of this a couple of years ago, but I wanted a more solid, Euclidean approach than he had before. Now that his sister is at that point, I've hired a tutor. They'll use Life of Fred as their base, but I have Jacobs and some other stuff to add in when needed.

Literature -- The Harvard Classics ... I inherited a set from my grandfather, and there is a sampler -- 15 minutes a day to hit the highlights. He'll be reading and journaling.

Writing -- TBD -- for the short term, he and little brother will be doing a short Star Wars literary study.

Game Science -- mostly with Dad -- we have a Great Courses video set, and there will be more discussion, reading and of course, games.

Older dd: Continuing most of what she has been working on -- Where Brook and River Meet, Miller-Levine Biology, LOF Geometry (math and science with her brother). I'll probably be assigning a list of classic for her to pick one a month to read and review.

Younger ds: Continuing through SOTW -- he's almost through Volume 3, and so focus will be from mid-1800s forward.

LOF Decimals and Percents

Star Wars Literary Unit with his brother

I need to work on adding more for him. We might return to McGuffey's readers, maybe Igniting Your Writing. He also would like some formal science or engineering, so I need to see what I have.

Younger dd: Brainquest 3 is her spine right now for busywork to keep her out of the way while I work with the olders. I also have a cursive program that I'd picked up for free on Currclick and she likes that, and doesn't seem to need more to learn it. I need to do more read-alouds with her this semester. I have plenty on the shelf, just need to get them out and read them. My plan is to read the first book or two in a series, get her hooked, and let her pick up from there. She can read anything, but lacks confidence with longer chapter books.

No travel on the plans right now, but that can change. Everyone has some big scouting projects. It's looking to be a fun semester.

Having Time to Be

I remember in the summers growing up, my mom tried to keep some semblance of a schedule going for us. Usually, we had a list of chores that needed to be done most days first thing, and then many days, there was an outing ... the commissary or the library. Where we lived for most of my early elementary years, I spent a week or two at the start of every summer in a Gifted enrichment program that I LOVED (how I wished that school could always be like that -- it was probably the first seeds of the idea that turned into homeschooling for me). But mostly, our summers were free.

As we got older, the school years weren't as free. I went to a high school that was an hour commute each way (ironically, they built the new school 2 years after I graduated, just 2 blocks from my bus stop, 10 minutes from my house). Between three of us in different levels of scouts, all of us playing sports, doing volunteer work, theater, etc. ... there just wasn't much down time. My dad was in the Navy, and deployed as often as not in those days (even if not deployed, it wasn't uncommon for him to be on a watch schedule that only let him home 2 days out of 3), so my mom was trying to keep up with all of this more or less as a single mom (complete with bookkeeping and visiting nurse jobs that she'd fit in to school hours). She was stressed, we were stressed. They were trying to make sure that we had every opportunity to learn new things, to explore the world, but often life was just crazy.

I don't think that that experience is that uncommon for my generation, or the generation that we're raising. But I'm not sure that it's my ideal.

A friend has a son who is finishing college now. (Who let him do that? when I 'met' her, he wasn't even a teen yet!) He recently wrote his mom a note. He tutors little kids, and was working with a kindergartener. The poor little guy was just so tired, he was having a hard time focusing, and it struck this young man how lucky he was that his mom had always made sure that he and his brother had had time to play.

Right now (11:00 on Monday morning), my little ones are up in the boys' room, with some elaborate story going. The youngest has done her schoolwork. Her brother hasn't yet, but there will be time later today for that. For now, I'll let them play. He may or may not remember the events of the election of 1824, but he'll definitely remember getting to spend time building a relationship with his sister that I hope will last the rest of their lives.

Outsourcing

One of the most common questions I've gotten about homeschooling, even back when my kids were little, was how will I teach all the subjects?

Well, thankfully, I did very well in school, and was confident going in in most subjects. Academic subjects, that is. Especially high school science and math, but I'm also tackling literature and history and doing fine. If any of them wanted to learn French, I'd do it, no problem. (Of course, I have one who is learning Latin, one working on American Sign Language, one wanting to learn Italian, and one learning Spanish.)

Academically, all of the kids have leaned toward math and science. We bred them that way -- from a long line of nurses, techies, their great-grandmother got a math degree before it was particularly accepted. My husband inherited her slide rule.

Unfortunately (ok, not really unfortunate), my older daughter has also inherited my mom's artistic ability. Of which I got none -- it all went to one brother in my generation. This child's curriculum this year is based on Anne of Green Gables. It's a great fit for her, giving her the grammar and literary analysis skills she needs in a relatively fun way, stretching her vocabulary, she likes the history (presented in a way that she's learning research skills), and lots and lots of crafts. Which is lots of fun for her, but for this non-sewing, non-yarncraft mom, assignments like 'crochet an afghan' or 'sew a gown' are a bit daunting. We got through the gown assignment ok ... Grandma had taught her to make doll dresses a few years back, so making a simple dress for little sister wasn't too bad. But crochet ... an afghan? (Several weeks later, there was a 'crochet a potholder' project ... we're still laughing at the order those assignments were put in. What's a potholder when you're in the middle of an afghan? SO, we're outsourcing. the mom of one of my older two children's friends crochets well. And she only has boys (one of the two just left for college this semester). So, she's teaching my daughter to crochet. After two sessions, an afghan still seems like a distant goal, but a potholder? Maybe so. And it's fun to see the relationship my daughter is developing with this other mom.

For the first time in my adult life, I have one of my close blood relatives living close by. My cousin started his master's in English at the big local university. I know how to write, but teaching it can sometimes be difficult, especially to teens and tweens, who are in the phase where parents don't know much. So, next semester, I might pay him to take over critique of some of the kids' writing. The older two did REALLY well writing in their first year of public school with their third grade teacher, so I'm hoping a change in teacher (to someone who teaches actual college students as part of his deal with the university) might help them make another leap to where I want them to be.

I LOVE science labs. But in juggling four children, they don't always get done. Now that the older children are at a higher level (high school honors Biology), the labs are more important. There's a guy who teaches near my parents who will be offering a traveling Bio Lab seminar. As confident as I am in teaching, it's much more likely to actually get done this way.

So, first of all, for those just starting out, really, don't worry about your own perceived gaps. Kindergarten is letters and counting and coloring. I hope that you know that. Start there, and don't borrow trouble from tomorrow. As you go, you can either learn with your child (I never expected to study Latin), or you can find people to help you fill in your own gaps.

A fresh start

So here I am, starting a new blog. I've blogged before, but haven't been consistent, yet people kept telling me that they find my life (which I usually find rather ordinary) entertaining. Meaning that they like to laugh at me. Ok, usually WITH me, but sometimes At, too. I'm ok with that. When I was younger, I had a habit of taking myself too seriously, so something like this challenges me to get rid of the last vestiges of that.

This will probably generally be a homeschooling day in the life record, but this week, there's not a whole lot of homeschooling going on. I have four children, 13 and 10 year old boys and 12 and 6 year old girls.

Hopefully, my older two will get some studying in tomorrow, as they have a Biology test on Friday, but other than that, we're having an unschooling week. This means that my firstborn is reading constantly. Mostly sci-fi from his father's bookshelves. My 12 year old is working on a novella that heavily features horses and dragons. She has also been learning to sculpt dragons in plasticine and Sculpey. My 10 year old has been building with Legos. And the little one (6) has been following them around in turn, cuddling up with big brother with her own books, playing Legos with her other brother, and playing Play-Doh alongside her sister.

On Monday, we had houseguests -- my husband's best friend from home (he's from Denver) and his wife.

We've also had long, long appointments with a new dentist (good checkups, they're just S L O W -- not sure we're going back, but to stay in network with insurance, it's either this office or a bit of a drive).

We spent the morning looking for the littlest's Halloween costume. We found oldests' right away (he's into laziness and bought a lace drapery panel ... he's a ghost of some sort ... the ghost of Granny's curtains? I found two pairs of jeans at Goodwill for myself, and my 12 year old found some, too. At Burlington Coat Factory, my older daughter and I both scored long sweaters with big warm cowl necks. Then at Target, we finally found a sparkly Dorothy dress and cheap ruby slippers. Over the weekend, there was a lot of Rock Band played. The little one likes to sing. One of the top songs was Let's Dance, so I guess that we shouldn't have been surprised when she declared 'Now I can dance the blues!' There was an era where I knew where the bathrooms were in every store. I'm sorry that I don't know where they are anymore, since I don't have toddlers/preschoolers. I was laughing so hard, I could have used a bathroom.

Wednesday afternoons are always crazy with karate. My older three are training to be junior instructors. They help with the homeschool class in the early afternoon, then have a two hour break, and are back to assist with a beginner class, then their leadership development class, and finally their own in-level classes (which my husband takes with them).

Now, they're watching Babylon 5 (they're almost halfway through season 4 ... it's a rite of passage for our 10 year olds to get to watch). Laundry and dishes are in, and when the kids go to bed, we'll work on hanging the artwork we bought as part of our family room re-do. 3' x 4' Venetian scene for $99.99 ... it's an art school reproduction, but we like it. We got a semi-matching Mediterranean shore scene for over the fireplace, too. Once they're up, hopefully we can start settling on paint colors for later in the winter.