I made huuuge progress with the kids’ schoolwork this week. Knowing I’d be gone for nearly the first half of March gave me the motivation to actually plan out their schoolwork a whole stinkin’ month in advance.
And I know most people won’t understand why that’s so difficult, but the learning experiences of a homeschooled child are constantly growing and changing which makes it very hard to actually map out more than a week of work. At least when you have kids like Stephen, who absorbs stuff so rapidly he’s blowing through his textbooks, or Hannah who’s just wonderfully, brilliantly ADD. Half the stuff they know was never on a lesson plan.
But, then again, the beauty of having a calendar set up is that the kids can work ahead a few days, or choose to skip a day and make the work up later. We’re all about being self-directed here.
Hannah’s picking up Japanese really quickly and is constantly correcting my pronunciation. And did I mention how well Stephen absorbs stuff? He’ll be sitting at the other end of the couch reading a book while we’re working, and he’ll just start translating things.
He did not appreciate being Hannah pointing at him and saying Nan desu ka?*
Me. Turkey. Five Days.
Yikes.
*What is it?
I’m not a firm proponent of homeschooling; I think there are problems with it, but there are problems with public and private schools as well, and thank God I don’t have to make any of those sort of decisions… Anyway, one of my sister’s friends homeschools, and her around 13- year- old daughter has decided that instead of learning French or Spanish, she wants to learn some very odd dialiect of a language that there’d be no way she’d be able to learn in public or private school. Hannah learning Japanese made me think of that; proactive homeschooling can be very cool.