Sunday, March 22, 2009

How's That Homeschooling Going?

Okay, okay, I'm really bad at keeping up on my blogging. I admit it. Partly, it's because I'm a very private person, and I live in fear that my real life will be blasted across the internet for everyone to know until the end of time. It's really a very scary prospect. Especially when freedom seems to be a little more rare than before, if you know what I mean.

Anyway, we've been doing pretty well. Our official studies took a break for a few months while we moved to a new house and visited family members all over.

History -- we completed SOTW vol 1. We skipped through some chapters when I read it, but then listened to the whole thing all over again on the CDs. (I love those!!). Now we're just starting vol 2 and enjoyed making Celtic warrior outfits.

Math -- we do this in fits and starts. It's nice that way. We've completed MUS alpha and just started on Beta. His understanding of math is really noticable -- I think he's really getting it! He had problems with place value and a few other things, but I think alpha (and time) helped sort that out.

Art -- we've gone nuts with coloring and watercolors!

Science and engineering -- He takes a local science class with a really neat guy. Plus I still throw science lessons in randomly whereever they happen. As a former scientist, that's pretty easy for me. We get out a lot of books about animals, too. We visited a tide pools, aquariums, a farm, and all sorts of other wonderfully sciency things. We also have a neat book from the library called "Build It!" which investigates all sorts of engineering principles in a very hands on way. It's been fun so far. Plus he has legos and 27 million other building tools.

Reading and writing -- Not there yet. He's been doing mazes and dot to dots. He sometimes types notes to my character in Warcraft (from his character). He'll get there when he does. I'm not going to push him. I invite him to read with me sometimes, but he doesn't like it very long and still seems to guess a lot. Oh, and my husband is teaching them some japanese characters (read and handwriting) -- it also goes into art here, as he had them painting some shoudou with them.

Music -- we've listened to jazz and blues and irish folksongs this month. We have some nice medeival music for a fwe months from now when we get tothe appropriate bits of SOTW vol 2.

Grammar -- Mad libs! And I sometimes get ideas from First Language Lessons, but I skip a lot and don't go by the script. Oh, and I keep trying to explain and explain to the girl about pronouns. She uses 'her' and 'she' incorrectly.

We saw a musical last weekend. That was nice! It had some homeschooling friends in it. We had some other plans for this weekend, but most of them fell through due to health and weather problems. Oh well!