It’s Friday and we’re wrapping up our first week of the new school year. I’m not going to say it’s been a great week. (You can check out my big downer post here.) But, we did get started, and there are a couple of things that seem to be working for us.
I started my two older children with math, English, and Latin only.
My son is using Life of Fred for math. He has done his math without complaining. (Until today. Today I’m having him do 5 multiplication problems and 5 division problems on PAPER to prove that he can actually multiply and divide. Oh the humanity!) Wait, I was supposed to sharing positive things. I switched up his English this year and bought Our Mother Tongue for grammar and Editor-in-Chief for mechanics. The good news is he likes Editor-in-Chief.
My daughter started Latina Christiana I near the end of last year. (It was a Homeschool Crew review product.) She only got through 5 chapters. I bought Ludere Latine to accompany the program this year and she’s using it alone to review the chapters she did last year. Next week she’ll start on new material.
I’ve been reviewing reading with my younger son. For the first 2 weeks, I’ve scheduled a phonics reader a day with him as a refresher course. So far that’s going well. We didn’t do as much reading over the summer as I needed and intended to do, so I’m happy to say he didn’t forget what he had learned.
There are two other general procedural things that are working well for us. One is that I switched to spiral notebooks after reading Joy @ fivejs post about it. In the past, I’ve had a pile of papers to file in binders and I’d already be behind. Not so this year! Also, I have a box for the kids to put their work in for me to check. I know, how simple is that? I don’t know why I hadn’t done that before. They just made a stack and then it seemed that putting their stuff away became my job after I checked it. This way everything has a place and they can put everything away. Now to just make sure I check it!
So those are some good things about my week. We’ll be adding more subjects next week and working on our schedule some more.
By Kristen H.