We are back into testing season.  Kelly is the only one taking a CLEP test (Western Civilization I) on the next (January 20) test date.  Then, neither Kelly nor Christian will be ready for their next CLEP test until March.  I was going to wait until closer to the end of the year to take our State of North Carolina required nationally normed standardized test, but since February is a test free month I decided to go ahead and get it out of the way for the year.  So, I signed them both up to take the ACT (with essay) on February 6.  We had a great time when they took that test last year.  The kids are tied up for 3-4 hours so Lorena and I have the chance to go out and have lunch, walk around the mall, and talk.

It is nice to work on some new stuff in our homeschool this winter.  Kelly will work on her essay preparation over the next month, maybe even posting some of her stuff here on the blog.  Christian will work on his stuff, too, but wants to practice a little more before he puts anything up on the blog.  Beside that Christian dived into his first big programming project.  I broke down over the holidays and bought text messaging for out telephones.  Kelly, the social one, uses it a lot to talk to her friends.  Just like the government schools, text messaging during school is out of bounds in the Chapman family homeschool.  Christian texts his friends a little, but decided he wants to write a program that accepts text messages from the telephone, executes them on his (Linux netbook) computer, then sends results back to his telephone as a series of text messages.  The plan is to use the Twitter libraries to get the messages from his phone to the computer, then use a C++ email library to send the results back through one of the SMS email services (maybe gmail) to his phone.  He is making great progress.