Week in Review--December 16, 2011

Being productive was a little difficult this week, at least at the beginning, due to Sofie's performances in The Nutcracker. She was a mouse, and was in three shows last weekend and two on Tuesday. Oscar's decided that he doesn't want to miss being in the show next year; he was the first of the two to be interested in ballet, actually, until shyness overcame him when he was four. He's over that now, largely in thanks to jujitsu and his wonderful sensei. I'm very glad he realized now that he wants to get back to it, while he still has time to make good headway before reaching the ages of the parts he hopes to play, instead of going back in a few years and being too inexperienced to play the more interesting roles.

In the end, though, we did still manage to do school each day. We won't begin using the winter quarter schedule that I posted this week until the quarter starts in January, so for now we've been taking advantage of my extra time and doing a slightly heavier load, which we also do during the summer break. Instead of doing three long math lessons and two short drilling sessions, we're doing math lessons each day and dropping the drill until I go back to school. We're also doing writing four times a week instead of three.

Wordless Wednesday--December 14, 2011

We covered the Viking invasions of the British Isles this morning, so naturally, we then did Oscar's first *ahem* "poetry analysis".

Weekly Lesson Schedule--Winter Quarter 2012

Note: We homeschool year-round and don't use a quarter or semester system for our homeschooling, but Brandon and I are both undergraduates (for physics and math, respectively), so our own schedules change with each quarter and the homeschooling schedule is adjusted accordingly.

Our winter quarter schedule is actually very similar to the one we had this fall, so we don't have to make many changes. The only significant change is that instead of leaving at 10:30 on Mondays and Wednesdays, Brandon and I will now need to leave by 7:45. The goblins will spend Sunday nights through Monday afternoons with their grandparents, and Richard (their dad) will stay over at our place on Tuesday nights. I'm the primary homeschooling parent, but now that I'm at university full-time Richard's taken on some of the more open-and-go curricula on the days I'm unavailable, so I've structured our homeschooling schedule with that in mind.

It's days like this one...

All day Monday through Tuesday morning was mostly un-fun on the homeschooling front. Tonight, Sofie begged to do a second spelling lesson and Oscar actually ran over when I said it was time for writing. Both kids shouted with joy I agreed to do a history lesson, even though we'd finished history for the week. It's days like this one that remind me how worthwhile this is.

Wordless Wednesday--November 9, 2011

Ozzy's choice for breakfast reading: the American Physical Society Newsletter

Standards and Grade Levels

Kindergarten isn't mandatory in California, so last year, which would have been Ozzy's kindergarten year, we didn't file an affidavit with the state or register with a charter school. I researched curricula and settled on a plan, then we implemented it. I didn't worry much about how he compared to public school kids, though I did try to pay extra attention whenever friends with kids in school mentioned what their kids were required to do, in an effort to make sure we didn't miss anything important. This year, having registered both goblins--Ozzy for first, Sofie for kindergarten*--with a charter school just to take advantage of the funds available for curricula and activities, I'm required to fill out a form throughout the year, indicating when they reach certain milestones in various subjects. I sat down with it at the beginning of the school year in August, and checked every.single.box. Everything Ozzy was supposed to be able to do by the end of first grade, he'd been doing for months. In fact, Sofie, at 4.5, was halfway through the list herself, and every box on her kindergarten form was checked.

Keeping up

Another question we're frequently asked about homeschooling is whether we plan to keep ahead or even just keep up with the goblins in each subject we cover--i.e. do we plan to keep our knowledge of each subject ahead of or at least equal to the goblins' progress? This question comes up frequently in homeschooling groups or forums as well, and I'm continually surprised by how many respond that they don't feel any need to stay ahead or keep up after a certain point, often the beginning of the high school years. This seems to come up most often in regard to math, and many parents (but not most) freely admit that their children have surpassed them so they just buy the textbooks and leave the kids to it.