Book of Days

Goodness…what a hectic start to this new “school year”.

My 16yod is a junior at a local high school. She is taking 3 AP classes as well as all her other classes being Honors classes. I have done more work helping her out than I think I did when I went to high school myself! She has on average about 4 hours of homework a night including studying for weekly chapter tests in each of her three AP classes. These chapters are 35-50 pages long and she is required to outline each as well as other written/reading homework. I had to laugh when I read this article about “homework”. Watching his older sister, Josh sure is glad he is homeschooling and ALL his work is homework lol.

I have had to change my Autumn reading challenge to compensate for all the “help” work I am doing. I have dropped the B&N classes :( but will eventually do some classes like these as I am able to for myself. I figure I am not really losing out as I am having “study” time with my daughter instead :)

My GBRP group is starting Gilgamesh next week and I am looking forward to that. I finally finished reading Bauer’s Well-Educated Mind but wasn’t able to post on the last few chapters. At least I am caught up with reading though.

Our homeschool studies are going very well. Our Chosen Path is working out so well for both Josh and I. He is doing his “independent studies” (he prefered this name to scholar studies lol) after we have finished our discipline subjects (english, math and character/virtue). He read/studied about The Byzantine Empire with Constantine for World History and has now moved on to Russian History. For American History he is reading about the period of the 1960s as he is interested in the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis and JFK. For science I found this great biology site as Josh is contemplating studying Wildlife Biology in college. For english we are using an old Voyages to English textbook we had to further knowledge in grammar and diagramming. Math has been fun as each day he practices skills but we also add “living math” in the form of fiction books (right now we are reading The Phantom Tollbooth), bios, and life skills. For read aloud, we just finished, The Master Puppeteer by Katherine Paterson. What a fantastic book! Josh begged me each day to keep reading and thought I was an ogre to prolong it out to “savor” the story lol. Our character/virtue studies have been going so well I am glad I added them in. We are using The Book of Virtues by William J. Bennet as well as reading myths and Bible stories. We decided to study the Shakespeare play, Twelfth Night, as my daughter’s high school will be performing it this fall. After reading a retelling of it in our favorite book, Tales from Shakespeare by Tina Packer, we are really looking forward to seeing this play and anticipating the humor that is involved.

All in all it has been a very good start this season of more structure for us. AND we are finally getting some cooler weather here in the desert. Looks like the 100s are finally leaving us and that means we will finally be outside more once again :) In fact, Josh and his dad are leading an Audubon birding trip this morning. Nothing better than a Saturday morning spent with the birds!