We drove over to the town of Wendell last night after work for a special meeting of our church the community center there. It was very nice and after the meeting, we were invited to a friend’s house to hear some stories about Peru from Kenion, one of our ministers. It was all quite uplifting and very good for the kids, but we ended up not getting home until about midnight. There was another family there who have their kids in the government schools, so we were all complaining about the difficulty of getting up early after a late night on a school day. Some expressed a little bit of surprise that it was an issue with homeschool families such as us. I am not really sure how other homeschool families organize their days, but we have found that if we do not plan the well, there is no way to accomplish everything. That is especially true at this time of year. The kids are well into their annual research reports. Standardized test come around at about the same time as do some special efforts we make to assure we are finishing the year up well in math and science, so a late night during the week can often mean significant extra work in the evening or on the weekend. That all being said, this late night was well worth it both in terms of education and inspiration.
The good news for the kids, though, is that we have a finite finish date. When we finish for the summer, we are truly finished. Before the end of the year, we pick one area on which the kids will work during the summer. We try to never picked a subject or a project because the kids are behind it. We have always picked something which would allow the kids to get further ahead than normal and/or learn something special or new. Mavis Beacon typing was one of the first things we did during the summer. It was a bit tedious for them at first. Then, as they got better, people started commenting on their typing skills and they actually looked forward to the chance to get better. We started our Mark Kistler’s Draw Squad drawing program with the idea that it would be a summer homeschool material, but it was way too much fun, so we quit calling it school. We still do it during the summer (with different books), but it does not count as their summer material. We have not really settled on what we will do this year, but I am leaning toward Spanish because I want the kids to finish their second year of Rosetta Stone so they can take the CLEP test and move on to French.
I hope to be able to post the annual research reports at the same time I write the May, 2008 Homeschool update.