First week homeschooling

Whee, homework mostly done, study group went well. Work is through until tomorrow.

Let me catch up on my blogging while I can.

We started last week. I had a couple of plans through the summer. Start him right in and keep him busy so he doesn’t have time to play video games all day, but we’d finish all my material by January. Or start him slow and easy to “handle” the public school detox that people talk about (no idea what this looks like or how to handle it). Some even suggest doing something non-schooly on the first day to clearly state this homeschooling is different. Then Mom wanted to take him for the week after Labor Day so I decided we’d start easy and then I could easily control the school work he had to do while at Mom’s. That made for a slow and uneventful first week.

He did chapter 1 in Vocabulary, read the first 4 summary pages of Kingfisher, finished the first 2 writing assignments (poems with creative adjectives and verbs), and read most of Gen 1-20 with a family tree of Abraham thrown in. He also completed the first 3 lessons for Life of Fred Algebra (so far I know all the answers). He explored the Encyclopedia Britannica DVD and started creating his Timeline notebook. He also read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and figured out that the meaning of life is 42.

I am loving Homeschool Tracker Plus. At the beginning of the week I just print out his assignments for those 5 days. Then as he hands in homework and I grade it, I just enter in the total points and how many he got, and it figures up his grade for me.

Then Mom got a job (that’s cause for celebration)!

That means he’s here this week instead of there. Today was ‘kind’ of slow – he has way more work to do this week, but he just did the mental preparation for it. Evidence will appear tomorrow. Today and tomorrow he will correct his vocab and math homework from last week, he will do his 3rd writing assignment (a paragraph on Ziggurats), write a page on Gilgamesh (he read it today), do lessons 4-7 in Life of Fred, memorize the 50 prepositions in Easy Grammar, outline his Bible reading from last week and this week, and write 2 more essays on topics from pages 8-9 in Kingfisher (Sumer, etc., including ziggurats). Today he also read the Calliope issue that talked about that time period. He quickly detected the pattern of all the subject matter. He’ll notice I did just as much work when we move onto Egypt next 😉

For free reading today he decided that A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court was too hard for him (maybe we’ll read it out loud together), so I told him to pick up Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. He read 4 chapters of that and then headed off to play the game he got for his birthday.

That was fine since I had to get my own homework done. Tomorrow should be good.