We are more than halfway through our third year of homeschool now and a few new things are just beginning to dawn on me. I have known that we were getting more efficient at doing the homeschool and we are even a little bit behind right now. Kelly has is a little bit behind in some math and vocabulary corrections as well as some Spanish assignments and Science experiments. Christian has a bunch of history and science corrections. This “behindness”, though, is a function of the fact that I have been away on business trips and we are still recovering from the holidays. To offset the behindness, both Kelly and Christian have finished their grammar books that I had planned for them to be doing for the whole year. Christian has finished the really hard Singapore math and has moved on to the more tractable Teaching Textbooks. Kelly has finished her Writing Apprentice. Both of the kids just have one more chapter left in their vocabulary books. The only area in which we are a lagging is Spelling Power, but we should catch up rapidly with the extra time.
I was thinking that it might have been a good idea to have backed off a little on some of the material to not finish so soon in the school year, but on reflection, I think this has turned out quite well. I have adjusted the plan to give the kids a little bit of a breather through the end of January. I will order new vocabulary, writing, and grammar materials for mid-February and March. We will take it a little slower on the writing and grammar as the kids will really be working on next years material. Then after we return from our Spring Break vacation, we will jump into the annual research reports.
The big new understanding that I had in thinking about this is that I really never planned for improved efficiency in doing homeschool. Maybe some of this has to do with the maturing of the kids, too. They can handle more as the get older, but next year, maybe I will try to figure out how to use this increased efficiency to do a second special project on the order of the the research reports, but in the first half of the year.