A typical homeschool evening

Homeschool day 58 of 180
Government school day 47 of 170

It was a fairly typical homeschool evening last night. I thought I would write down what happened to give a sense for our normal evening schedule. Lorena passed me going the other way as I came home from work last night. She was taking the kids to swim team practice. So, the house was empty again when I got there. I had a snack and sat down to correct Kelly’s homeschool work. I could not find her math, but was able to correct everything else before the family got back home. They were dead tired when they arrived, so rather than jump into any corrections, we made some popcorn and read a chapter of Young Fu of the Upper Yangtze by the fireplace. We almost finished when Lorena called us for supper. For some odd reason, she decided that we absolutely had to have some Jimmy Dean’s Sausage. Every now and then she gets a whim like that. We are glad she did. I do not know how healthy it was, but at that place and time, it tasted very, very good.

After we ate, I finished the page and a half we had left to read in Young Fu. Kelly then found her math for me so I headed on upstairs to correct it forgetting that we were supposed to do Spelling Power. We will have to make that up tonight or Friday. We cannot do it on Thursday because that is another normal Spelling Power night; it is almost impossible to double up and do two Spelling Power sessions in one day unless you do one in the morning and one in the evening. Finally, I got to Christian’s homework. He had done three days worth of very hard Singapore Math work in one day due to a misunderstanding about the schedule, so he was justifiable frustrated with all that math. Normally, I correct his math and then go through the stuff he missed so he will be ready the next day. Because of the misunderstanding, he will do his math corrections today for me to correct tonight. If we get it all finished up tonight, he will be a day ahead of schedule and will have some extra time for his claymation, probably on Friday. He had way fewer corrections on the rest of his homework than usual and an especially good write-up on a book he is reading about Eric Liddell, the Olympic runner on which the movie “Chariots of Fire” is based.

Kelly fixed her math, but had not yet gotten to her twenty Rosetta Stone Spanish for the day. She also needed to play an additional four minutes to finish her piano practice. Her improvements testify to the fact that she is so scrupulous in spending the required amount of time practicing. We all marvel at the new things she learns to do on the piano every week. Kelly was going to try to take a math test yesterday as she has finished a major section of her text. The math test is the equivalent of doing an entire daily math assignment. She was only able to complete the first half yesterday and will try to finish the rest today. The highlight of the day for Kelly (this is just my opinion) was the poem she wrote. She promised that she would post it to the blog when she has a chance later today. She made quite an interesting comment about her poetry. She likes to read and write poetry a whole lot more than study it as an academic subject. My sentiments are the same, but her poetry surely does seem to have improved since she started studying it earlier this year.