I had about a two hour conversation last night on the telephone with our good friends David and Rebekah in Texas. They homeschool twin boys who are just between the ages of Kelly and Christian. They do an absolutely stellar job in their homeschool. One idea they tried that we are going to implement for sure is their planning method. Currently, I make out the schedules one or two weeks in advance. I list all the things the kids need to accomplish each day of the week, then they figure out how they will get things done for each day. The new method will be to provide weekly goals, let the kids make their own schedule that meets the goals, review the schedule before the week starts, then follow the progress of the schedule as it is implemented. It is a great progression. Another idea they brought up was the possibility of getting certain certifications that require fairly short-term efforts, but that allow the holder of the certificate to work in interesting environments. The two that were brought up are those required for pharmacy and EKG technicians. I am going to look into these and several other great ideas we discussed on the telephone.
Christian and I continued work on the ham radio kit last night. We got all the resistors soldered into place. We plan to continue on to the next set of components tonight. We still have a couple of nights of reading in our evolution book before we can move on to the intelligent design and radio theory books we are going to read aloud next. We also read a novel aloud, but will not read further in that until we go on our homeschool trip to Tennessee in January.