Tuesday

I'm listening to XM Kids on the computer because, well, it's funny, althoug D. Dynamite is my least favorite dj on this station. I like Mindy and the Animal Farm guy in the morning. They make me laugh.

Today was all over the map. It was a day of gettin' things done, but no more than a few hours on each task. This evening I worked on lesson plans. We've been doing a lot of "turn page, do next lesson" for the last two months and while that works pretty well, every so often I find it wise to sit down and take a look at the curriculum and see what is working, what's not, and what I might want to do differently after Christmas break.

Here's what I came up with:

1. Math. This will be the first year since we started homeschooling that we didn't pluck up the whole family and move it thousands of miles sometime during the school year resulting in two and a half months "off" in the middle of the year. We've always been able to get "everything" done in that time anyway in spite of some serious slacking during periods of intensity during my work. So the first thing I noticed was that at this rate we'll be done with the math textbook in, um, the first week of March. Like, March 2nd or so. Let me tell you how often we reached the end of the math book when I was teaching in the classroom (and let me remind you that while there are subjects I may avoid and that I didn't hit that hard when I was in the classroom, say, um, science, that MATH is the subject I got done no matter what plague I might have come down with while taking attendance. For one thing, it's a subject the kids did quietly, for another, I've mentioned before that I just like it.)

That sentence is a gramatical disaster so let's abandon it and move on.

Never. Never is how often I reached the end of the math textbook while teaching in the classroom. So here we are, on track to reach the end of it March 2nd. We've nailed multiple digit multiplication and long division and here it is December 6th. We're coming up hard on addition and subtraction of fractions and using decimals instead of remainders. hoo-wee! We can't be stopped.

So what's a girl to do? Well, I'm all for hitting algebra early so you can hit calculus for the first time sophomore year, but we're already on track for that, so there's no sense in moving on to the next level of math. I'd rather switch to a different "approach" and just dig in deeper with what the boy has already learned.

Frankly, my biggest problem with Saxon is that it breezes so quickly through some of this stuff.

Here's long division! Got it? Cool, move on . . .

This hasn't been a problem for Max because our gene pool is cool with math. If it were spelling he'd have been dead in the dust on the first week of school. But my experience is easy come, easy go, so we'll have some cake March 3rd and then the following Monday dive back into Right Start Level E. (I LOVE Right Start but it is soooo working Mom unfriendly. My only "complaint" with this program continues to be that it is SO parent-intensive. That and the price for fancy photocopies. Anyway, I'll have to suck it up for March, April, and May.)

So that's math. Finish up by March 2nd, switch to "enrichment" program until end of year.

2. Writing. Historically I've skimped on writing during the first half of the year. The first year I did so because Max broke out in hives and dissolved into a whimpering blob of little boy when I put a pencil in his hand, so we did very controlled exposure to the pencil until that reaction was eliminated. Last year we needed to spend the first part of the year really focusing on spelling. In January we started doing more writing and we kept that up until the move two and a half months later. Yeeeaaah. ::cough:: Nevertheless, he continues to look just fine on the ITBS in that department except for the whole capitalization and punctuation thing.

So this year I got a book just on capitalization and punctuation and we've done formal composition using the "writing process" sometimes six weeks in a row -- and then nothing for a month. So looking ahead to January all I know is that I have to put it in the same category as math and Latin -- the things we still do even when we can justify dropping everything else.

3. Science. I'm sorry all you better-than-me homeschooling teachers. The best I can come up with here is to vow to continue telling him to turn the page and read the next lesson. Be glad I bought the 4th grade textbook and that he loves reading it. Puuurty pictures. On the days he doesn't read Science, he reads a 4th grade Health textbook that PA wants us to read -- that is, they want us to "teach health" so we bought a Health textbook and since I'm not easily offended, it works fine for us. He loves it. We have interesting conversations afterwards. So, no changes planned in '06.

4. History. History is a problem because PA would kinda like us to cover basic American history and we're doing SOTW 3, which means we're all over the map from the same time period, but we only hit the main ideas. Not a lot of details. I'm thinking maybe we'll get a Harcourt fourth grade social studies textbook and then spend two years reading it on the side. I don't see much reason to spend 5th grade "studying the states." We'll go back to Ancient Civilizations and then read the American history book on the side. So, um, sometime in January we'll add that in. I haven't even ordered the book yet.

5. Latin. We seem to have dropped Latina Christiana entirely and are just happily bumping along at a leisurely pace in Cambridge Latin Course. I really LOVE this curriculum. You could NOT start it any earlier than fourth grade and you really, really, really have to be cool with spending literally weeks longer on each lesson than it's written for because it's written for high schoool. But it's a lot of fun, has SO many activities (in the Student Edition and in the workbook at and the website), and is just not nearly as deathly dull as LC can be. I can still see why you'd want to do both, but I couldn't keep up with two programs after two months.

6. Spelling. No change. Still love Sequential Spelling by AVKO.

7. Reading. We've been doing a basal since January of last year and that has served us really well. This year I haven't been eager to move out of it because frankly, when your nine year old is reading HP 6 and HP 3 simultaneously so as to more closely track character development and link past events to recent events -- well, chances are he's developing nicely. Get out of the way and let the boy swim. But come January he'll be done with the HPs and thrashing around hungrily for something new to sink his teeth into. So I've dusted off the old WTM and looked around online and chewed on my lip a lot. That's as far as I've gotten with that.

8. Music. We just do what his piano teacher tells us to do. She tells us to do a lot, so that's pretty much it. No changes.

I didn't make any plans for the twinkies. We keep picking up 100 Easy Lessons whenever I think of it and the twins make it clear that they could and would do it a LOT more than I pick up the book, but they're saddled with me for a teacher so they're up a creek.