A Little Rebellion Every Now & Then

We’re actually completing our history work at a faster pace than originally thought; currently, we’ll finish history as the calendar finishes June. This is excellent news, though, because starting next week, we’ll begin Latin again, as well as spelling. Both of those will continue throughout the summer. The goal for spelling is to complete Level One before we begin third grade; the goal for Latin is merely to continue progressing.

At the beginning of July, we’ll begin doing some of the much-neglected science work that desperately needs to be completed!

I’ve begun sketching out math assignments for the coming year. Of course, I live in hope that we’ll somehow manage to do more than anticipated, but I’m planning for the least amount of work I expect, and then hopefully I’ll be having to revise lesson plans while I’m nursing a new one coming mid-November. A girl can dream, can’t she?

Even though no one is actively reading this, this is public and as such it’s a useful tool, when I choose to use it, for accountability.

I’m cautiously optimistic that we’re getting back into the swing of things, only better than ever. That’s the plan, at any rate!

Today’s accomplishments include recitation, three pages in Developmental Math Level Six, a Calculadder drill sheet (time: 2:30; she’s getting close!), a supplemental Latin worksheet as well as an activity in the Latin activity book, two lessons of grammar, handwriting practice, copywork, and skip counting practice.

Additionally, I’ve readjusted plans for recitation through next year, as well as plans through the summer months for mathematics. We’re going to (finally) go to using two math programs daily. Math is a priority and our time expenditures need to reflect that fact.

What we haven’t done at all lately is history, but I plan for us to rectify that situation either tonight or tomorrow. We haven’t done classical studies in quite awhile but I want to save that for summer work; similarly, we’ll really concentrate on science over the summer.

I hope.

This school year is much, I think, like this particular blog: stuck in the past. It feels as if we’ve made little to no progress since the beginning of the year in many areas. Gillian still doesn’t have her addition facts memorized; Gillian still cannot recite the entirety of Sara Coleridge’s The Year, despite months of work; I still have not organized the school area of the house. Life and time keep flowing past us, causing me no little bit of distress. There are the successes, yes, but they are not many.

If one can be said to have failed a year of homeschooling, then surely I and this year so far do qualify.

However, like this blog, it can be restarted. Like a smelly old sock, we can wash out the grime, dry it, and begin again. Gillian is young and resilient, and time cannot be brought back, but it can be made up.

At least that’s what I keep telling myself.

There’s nothing like a conference followed by hosting an organization’s garage sale to totally throw your life off track. School is, of course, just one more casualty of it.

I can’t even begin to comprehend how far ‘behind’ we are from what I expected. Basically, we got nothing whatsoever done in any ‘content’ areas last week. I managed to somewhat keep her up to speed in Latin, but we’re still going to spend this week on the same vocabulary as we did last week.

Deep breaths, deep breaths.

I’m trying to use today as an evaluating day, and then I’ll move forward and write out my plans for the rest of the week. I feel all panicky, even though there’s no reason to…

Between this week and last, there are nine potential school days. Two of these have been a Thursday, which means outside classes and little work done at home. For another five of those days (one of which did overlap with a Thursday), we had an out of town guest; a lot of fun, but still disruptive to the idea of routine. Finally, tomorrow, our house is the location of a garage sale for my Mothers & More chapter. Essentially, then, that leaves two days with which something could be done.

Needless to say, we’re running a bit behind where I thought we might be at this point.

However, we’re plodding forward with the bare minimum and everything else is just gravy until next week!

On Gillian’s desk, there is a lamp and a pencil sharpener. While the pencil sharpener still has old batteries, the clutter around and on the desk is gone. On top of the rolling storage drawers, books are ready for the coming year. The assignment sheet sits on the clipboard.

Inside the drawers, last year’s books and papers are filed away, and this year’s are waiting. In the window alcove, a few reference books sit, easy to access for Gillian, and so does the globe. The rest of the floor is clear.

Most of the piles near my part of the schoolroom have been cleared, save one larger, more troublesome one. The notebooks for organization of school papers have been separated from the other school supplies and are sitting beside the bookcase waiting for me.

I have a few more tasks to complete before I will feel ready for the new school year to begin, but I feel much calmer than I did two days ago.

One week and three days until we officially start our 2006-2007 school year, that is.

The school area is, to put it mildly, a mess. There are schoolbooks strewn everywhere around the house, and there are non-school things everywhere with the school stuff.

Our routines are completely off. We haven’t had a consistent wake time in weeks.

We haven’t managed to reconfigure the playroom to keep Jacob happier while we’re doing school.

I haven’t picked out items for recitation, I haven’t replaced the batteries in the pencil sharpener, and I don’t have my organization system for school papers set up.

I’m planning to work on all of this for awhile tonight, again tomorrow, and possibly Sunday. I’ll do what I can during the week next week, but I don’t anticipate it being very much. Then I’ll have the long weekend to finish what I can. The playroom won’t be reconfigured until at least three weeks into the schoolyear, and I don’t think that the batteries will get replaced until then either. It’s a toss-up as far as the organization for school papers.

Despite all of that, I think we’re just about ready. It’s time to note the turning of the year. I wish we could wait and start on the first official day of autumn, but we’d need to continue too far into June for Gillian to attend some of her camps and things that she enjoys so much. So we’ll mark the turning twice, once when we start schooling again, and then once more on the first official day of autumn.

Perhaps it’s premature to be concerned, as we’re only on Leccion Cuarto (that is, Lesson 4) of La Clase Divertida, out of fifteen total lessons. However, if we manage to follow anything close to the schedule I outlined last week, we’ll finish it sometime around Christmas, which means I have to consider the next step.

Generally, La Clase Divertida is working well for us. G seems to have good retention, and I like that it talks about the culture as well as the language. The problem I have with it is that some of cultural segments are… honestly, they seem quite prejudiced, not to mention slanted to a Christian perspective. In the puppet segment of Leccion Tres, the puppet toucan (voiced by Senor Gamache) says that before Cortes came, the native people worshiped a feathered serpent. Fair enough. Then he proceeds to laugh and say “Not very intelligent, eh?” The whole story is told with an air of glorifying the behavior of Cortes and making Montezuma seem rather dumb and backwards.

So I don’t know if I want to spend the money on the next level of La Clase Divertida. It offers several things that I want from a Spanish program, namely that the emphasis is on conversational skills, and the fact that it includes materials for two students (and hence, I don’t have to wonder what to get for Jacob down the line) is a nice bonus. However, it’s a significant expenditure for something with which I may not be entirely happy.

Complicating matters is that I don’t want to use anything that requires the computer until she’s older, which means Rosetta Stone is right out. If I decide to stick with La Clase Divertida, I don’t know how much of Rosetta Stone would be review, but I think that’s where we’d go, and then when we finished Rosetta Stone, we’d find a class or tutor or something. Maybe. I don’t know!

I’ve been spending a lot of my thinking energy on mathematics lately; specifically, arithmetic, and the mastery thereof.

Gillian does a great job at understanding the concepts and processes behind a lot of arithmetic, but what she hasn’t yet mastered is the immediate recall. That is, she’s not ‘learned her facts.’

On the one hand, she’s still not even six years old, and pushing her to memorize too quickly isn’t a great plan. On the other hand, though, this lack of knowledge means that’s she slowed on work that should otherwise take her a matter of minutes.

We just purchased a lot of new resources for math. Starting next week on Monday, we’re going to do CaluLadder drills on a daily basis. I’ve purchased some flashcards (just for addition, so far) that we’ll go through on daily basis. We’ve also got learning wrap-ups that she enjoys doing.

What I’m not sure about, though, is whether I should pause in terms of our formal curriculum while she masters the addition and subtraction facts, or if we should continue onwards. If we continue onwards, I think that mastery will likely be achieved around the time we want to introduce addition with carrying and subtraction with borrowing, which seems to dovetail nicely. I considered concentrating on multiplication concepts while we master the addition and subtraction facts, but ultimately, multiplication facts have to be mastered as well… which leaves us back where we started, in a manner of speaking.