I haven’t really had time to sit and blog about everyday homeschooling life. 🙂 With the end of the year, I had to catch up on entering our receipts into Quicken. Not a fun job, but necessary so we can see where we are spending our money. I realized this year that we use PayPal a lot and it is a pain to itemize in Quicken.

Anyway…

This week we, really the kids, are doing better with getting back into their routine.

I am having MaryEllen do half lessons of math (Saxon 65) because her error rate was pretty high. She was missing around 6 problems per lesson. Most of her errors were not from misunderstanding the work, but from not paying attention to detail. She would write problems down wrong or forget a step and sometimes miscalculate.

Last week and this week thus far, she has had no errors. 🙂 I told her to slow down and to recheck her work after doing five problems (got that idea from the Robinson Curriculum YahooGroup). I am not sure how long I will have her do it this way, but it has put a boost in her confidence.

Writing is coming along. Next month she will do the Writing Course again. Dr. Lybrand recommends the student redo it every semester. RC has the student write a page a day, an hour in upper grades. I require MaryEllen to write  a page front and back double-spaced every day. She has done real well with this and sometimes exceeds the one page requirement.

Donnie also writes a page a day, but I only require one side double-spaced. His neatness is improving, especially when he takes his time. He is still working on bring down his tails in the letters p,g,q,y,j. For some reason, he sits them on the line. In time, in time.

I sat down with them about a week ago to go over the reading requirements. We had slipped and were not reading as much as we were suppose to. The kids would ask part way through their reading if they could stop…they had read a chapter and it was long, etc. I gave in too much.

I reminded them that they were to read 2 hours a day. Yip, I got some looks. But I then gave them the public school speech.

‘Now remember, if you were in public school you would have a math class, a history class, a science class, a reading class, a writing class, and maybe even a geography class. Each of those classes would last about 40 minutes. Here at home, you get your history, science and geography through reading, and it isn’t from a textbook either. I have you read autobiographies where you actually read about history from those who made history. You read about real places and people that are told in a fun story form.’

I also went on to remind them that they would have vocabulary for each of these classes as well as questions to answer after each chapter. The first half hour of the two hour reading period is spent on vocabulary from the RC curriculum.

MaryEllen asks, ‘Mom, what is a textbook?’  🙂 Gotta love it!

Blessings,