Other than the posting of Kelly’s report on the Lost Colonies and Christian’s report on Artillery, this will be the last post of the 2007/2008 school year. It has been a great year. Kelly is well prepared to move on from Junior High School into High School and Christian is ready to move on from Elementary School to Junior High School. I will hit just a few of the highlights for the past year and then describe a little about where we go from here. I will finish up with some of our educational plans for the summer.

Christian’s year

Christian finished his first year of Sonlight‘s two year survey of world history. He has finished up Elementary Algebra, Apologia General Science, all the Easy Grammar workbooks, and his final year of cursive writing instruction. Christian made some great strides in his guitar playing this year. His new teacher, Andrew Kasab is perfect for Christian both in motivation and instruction. This is really the first time he has had an uninterrupted year of instruction from the same teacher since he first started taking guitar lessons. Another area where we have seen an elevated level of dedication and improvement is in his Spanish. He finished Rosetta Stone Spanish I and is well into Spanish II. Christian did very well on the PASS standardized tests we took for this year. Next year he will move on to Sonlight’s second year of world history, Teaching Textbooks Intermediate Algebra and Geometry, Apologia Physical Science, and preparation to take the CLEP Freshman English Composition test by the end of the school year for six semester hours of college credit.

Kelly’s year

This was Kelly’s last year using the Sonlight curriculum. She did a one year survey of U.S. History. It provided a good coverage of the sweep of U.S. history, but Kelly did not feel that she got either a big picture view or an understanding of how major events, places, and people tied together into a whole until she studied for the CLEP U.S. History I test. In addition, at the end of the program, the instruction tended to be from a hard left viewpoint. We were glad Kelly could pick that out, but we were disappointed all the same that she had to. Still, because the course was relatively thorough and because of the less politically charged CLEP preparation course, Kelly had a good year both in history and literature. She also finished Teaching Textbooks Intermediate Algebra and Apologia Physical Science. She finished Rosetta Stone Spanish I and moved on to Rosetta Stone Spanish II. We are really glad that Kelly is hitting it off with her new piano teacher. Her piano planning has really gone to a new level since she got here to North Carolina. Of course, Kelly has worked hard, but a lot of credit goes to her new teacher, Brenda Bruce, too. Kelly also did well on the PASS standardized tests we took for this year. Next year she will go on to Geometry, Pre-calculus and Apologia Biology. We have started a big push to get her ready for the Community College. As part of that, next years goals will be to pass a good number of additional CLEP test. I will describe those in a later post.

Summer schedule

We joined the brand new YMCA that opened up near us at the beginning of May. Christian and Kelly are on the swim team there. They have their first time trials on Saturday and the first swim meet is the week after that. They will be going to swimming practice early in the morning, Monday through Thursday. Kelly will continue with piano and Christian with guitar through the summer, but at a reduced schedule. Their only solo academic pursuit will be to do 15 minutes per day on Rosetta Stone Spanish per day per kid. We have three learning projects we will do over the summer, but two of them are hobbies and one of them is a very interesting read-aloud.

  • We plan to draw every evening when I get home from work. We are working our way through a great book on how to accurately draw faces. We enjoy this very much and have discussed it before in several places.
  • We plan to study for the Amateur Radio Technician Class license with the thought that we will even go on to the General Class license if we have time this summer.
  • We plan to read the world view book each night that we started earlier this week.