We’re nearing the end of week 3, and I can state with cautious optimism that we seem to be settling into a routine that has some reasonable chance of working. Both kids have had some challenges in finding their feet this year, but that’s typical. I just wish I could remember that from year to year, instead of having it always catch me by surprise.
So, I thought today I’d stop and breathe and take stock of where we are.
History and Literature are going well. Both kids enjoyed the Arthurian selections, and my son is enthusiastically gobbling up some Scandinavian myths that I substituted at the last minute for the Time Warp Trio Viking book.
The assorted languages are, on the whole, proceeding well. My daughter is outright enjoying the new Latin series: So You Really Want to Learn Latin (Published in England by Galore Park). My son is working more and more independently and consistently in Primer B of Latin for Children. He’s also enjoying The Learnables Spanish and has begun to sprinkle his new vocabulary into daily conversations.
My daughter’s German II course is turning out to be a bit more demanding than she had anticipated. I think much of the problem comes from trying to make the transition from Rosetta Stone’s “immersion” approach to the more traditional, grammar-based, textbook approach. She had done all of Rosetta Stone’s Level 1 (which is supposed to be equivalent to two years of high school foreign language) and was supplementing with an additional workbook for grammar, but she’s feeling very frustrated by encountering so much unfamiliar vocabulary in the new text. For the moment, we’ve quit trying to reach specific weekly goals for the amount of work done and are focusing on having her get into the groove of spending at least a certain amount of time each day making some progress. I’m also getting a crash course in German—with which I have almost no familiarity—as I try to help her with the lessons and exercises. I do feel like she’s turning the corner, though, and gaining some confidence. I’ve floated the idea of slowing down to as little as half speed and taking a full year to get through the half-unit course, but I suspect she’ll begin to pick up the pace within a few weeks.
Composition and grammar are flowing right along. My daughter is very much enjoying Wordsmith and seems to be keeping up nicely with the do-it-yourself approach and the assignments. My son is, as always, trying to get away with doing as little actual writing as possible in his assorted language arts workbooks, but is making big improvements in his history outlines and science summaries. He seems to be very proud of his attempts at cursive and even asks to do some of his regular work that way.
My daughter is taking Statistics by distance education as her math for this year. She’s already had Algebra I and II and Geometry and really wanted a “break” before tackling Precalculus next year. She’s gotten a bit of a slow start, but seems to be adjusting now to the format of the course and getting more enthusiastic about the subject. I think it’s still too early to tell whether this one will be a hit or a miss.My son’s math course, as I’ve already mentioned, got off to a rocky start. Things do seem to be improving after our week of concentrated hand-holding. I’m still more involved than I would like in supervising to make sure he’s paying attention to and following the directions, but it is clear that the actual math is well within his reach. He recently did well enough on one of his assignments that the instructor asked permission to use it as a sample to show other students.
Science is also turning out to be more of a challenge for my daughter than I would have expected. She’s taking Chemistry through our state’s virtual high school, which we both thought she’d love. However, she’s struggling. And I can’t quite tell whether it’s because she’s genuinely not prepared, whether she’s just not putting in the required amount of effort or whether the course isn’t especially well designed. I have noticed already that there have been a few questions on the assessments and exams that seem to require students to recall information that is pretty detailed. She’s finding the work very frustrating, and I’m not sure where we’ll go from here.My son is doing fine with his science reading, and both of them are enjoying our weekly chemistry labs.
He is also enjoying his geography work. As a sort of appetizer, he’s working through the “Global Geography” section of The Complete Book of Maps & Geography. He’ll then move on to a World Geography workbook from Carson Dellosa. And we’re tying geography to our history studies by doing an activity or two each week from Knowledge Quest’s blackline historical map set.
Another bright spot in our days has been my daughter’s virtual AP Microeconomics course. This is something she chose to do for fun, and she’s finding the coursework very interesting. She did hit a snag with the first exam, but that’s a characteristic problem for her, and I’m confident she’ll get better.
Both kids are also enjoying their logic and rhetoric studies. Since we didn’t transition to the classical approach until my daughter started high school, she had never done “logic” in any systematic way. So, she’s doing a crash course this semester using the Oxford University Press Very Short Introduction: Logic. It’s light reading and a clear, no-nonsense and friendly style.My son continues to enjoy the Orbiting with Logic books from Prufrock Press. He’ll finish the series this year, so I’m already looking around for a good next step for next year.We’re working through The Art of Argument together, mostly orally over breakfast. Both kids are doing fine with it so far, and my son, especially, is intrigued with the idea of learning to “argue like a gentleman.”
So, all in all, the year is shaping up to be exactly as full and challenging as I had anticipated. We’ve already hit a few rough patches on the road, and I’ll admit to more than a few moments of really wondering whether a given curriculum is going to work. And, as you can see from the list above, there are a couple of things that are still a bit up in the air. However, if our experiences in previous years holds true, all of this will eventually fall into place.
Now I just have to turn my energies to hoping that happens soon!
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