Year: 2010

It is hard to catch up when you get behind.  We are in the middle of that right now.  After all the traveling and the holiday break we have found ourselves about a week behind in several of our homeschool materials.  That manifested itself very clearly in our recent homeschool planning.  It is a little bit frustrating, but once we had identified all the issues and made a plan, it seemed a whole lot more tractable.  We are in the midst of a two week period where all of us will have to work late every night, then work through a couple of weekends to get to the point where life is sane again.  The funny deal is that it is invigorating for all of us to have a high goal and an aggressive plan to get there.

There will be setbacks in the completion of the plan.  Some of it involves math which is something that requires firm understanding of complex things.  It cannot be rushed.  So, while we plan for a hard two week push, it might turn into a hard three week push.  All of this will be worth it when we meet our goal.  Just about the time Kelly takes her next CLEP test, we should be caught up.  By then, we should be ready for a new read aloud book.  We are nearing the end of your 900 pages US History text (awesome) and plan to read something on the art of gracious argument before going on to a 900 page Ancient History text.  First, though, we have to get caught up.

Today is BUSY and I’m a little lazy, so I’m just gonna put up some overdue Christmas photos and catch up on the blog later. 🙂

Sugar cookies that Jenna and I made

Tons of chocolate covered pretzels and a cookie bag. Please ignore the mayonnaise and artichoke hearts.

Jenna and I before going Christmas shopping. If you can’t tell, Jenna’s the fashionable one, and I’m the candy cane. You should have seen my knee socks… o_O

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.

We want to build one of these:

Last night, the kids and I sat down and reworked their homeschool schedules for the next month or so.  Kelly is now writing her own schedule based on goals we established together.  It was really fun to do that with her and the schedule she put together was quite good.  I am sure we will have to refine it a little over the next few weeks, but it is a super starting place.  Christian starts Precalculus today so he is invigorated, too.  We worked out a couple of times over the long weekend so we got a good start on our “live healthy” resolution for the New Year.