Successful Week

Just in case you haven't kept up with the Lambs progress, let me start with a review.

Lamb 1 is almost 13 and in 7th grade. We are considering sending him to our Lutheran high school in 9th grade. We may continue homeschooling. Either way, we are spending the next year and a half of homeschool getting him ready for high school. I am expecting more independent work from him this year. I consider myself to have been homeschooling since he was 3 years old. Homeschooling has been good for this firstborn that taught himself to read.

Lamb 2 is 10 1/2 and the right age for 5th grade. He did a year of vision therapy and occupational therapy in 2014. He is ahead of 5th grade in some subjects and behind in other subjects. We are continuing to work on learning to read this year. I learned a lot about how to teach a child with learning difficulties when homeschooling Lamb 2. I love that with homeschooling he is not kept behind in areas that he is capable of working ahead nor made fun of for being behind in other areas.

Lamb 3 is 8 1/2 and the right age for 3rd grade. He is also ahead of 3rd grade in some subjects and behind in other subjects. I have learned a lot about schooling boys when homeschooling Lamb 3. This is the first year he has been interested in learning how to read. We are continuing to work on learning to read this year. Lamb 3 attended our church preschool and we considered sending him to the church for kindergarten, but he wanted to be homeschooled. Homeschooling has been good for him to listen in on lessons for his brothers and to be challenged to keep up with them too.

We got a late start to our school year after moving, but we have completed 71 days of homeschool in Indiana. We added all subjects back in this week after a break this fall from Latin and poetry memorization and subjects like that. This week we began listening to the audio version of Story of the World volume 1. We began reading this together a few years ago but never finished. I am hoping we will be more disciplined to daily listen to the audio version. We began listening to DVDs of Leonard Bernstein Young People concerts. We began listening to Moody Science DVDs. We began Apologia Exploring Creation with Botany. We worked on memorizing the commandments and Lamb 1 worked on memorizing the meanings for the commandments this week.  We are reading about Mozart. Lamb 1 read The Sign of the Beaver by Elizabeth Speare.

I plan to blog more about what we are doing in homeschool this semester in future posts. I am trying a lot of new curriculum for language arts and I especially want to go into more detail for that.

The Lambs were a little frustrated that school took more time than when we didn't do as many school subjects. But we all kept on and they did well. When I gave them a break this afternoon after working hard all week, they acted like they missed the structure of a longer school day!

I am very pleased with our first intense homeschooling week of 2017. Next week we have some friends coming to visit so we won't have quite so long of school days. Hopefully because we got off to a good start this week we can continue to make good progress.