Still Playing Catch-Up

[Insert heavy sigh here.]

We might have had a chance if it hadn't been for those extra ballet rehearsals.

We started the week with just a few "leftovers" from last week. And RobotBoy had a really good attitude about getting it all done.

Then we got the e-mail telling us that the ballet company was doing full run-throughs Tuesday through Friday afternoons, starting at 2:00 each day. They asked the boys to attend at least two of those rehearsals.

Since RobotBoy has his organ lessons at 3:00 on Thursday, followed by choir practice, we decided not to have him attend the ballet rehearsal that day. That left three days to choose from, and since "at least two" was the minimum, RobotBoy felt strongly that he should go to all three. Hence, we had very short homeschool days available because we needed to leave the house by shortly after 1:00 on Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday.

In addition, both of the adults had eye doctor appointments on Wednesday that took far, far longer than we had anticipated. So, RobotBoy didn't have any time available on Wednesday to do any catching up.

Hence the heavy sigh indicated above.

Still, we persevered . . . until Thursday.

I assume he was tired. In addition to being extra busy, he's so excited about the upcoming shows that he's having trouble falling asleep at night. In any case, he hit a wall with math on Thursday: couldn't concentrate, wouldn't listen, had a total meltdown. I insisted that he finish the lesson without me, since he was so ungracious about accepting my help. And he completely bombed out.

He did eventually pull it together and get the day's work done, but we ended up having to re-do Thursday's math lesson on Friday. Since he had also not done a math lesson on Wednesday, we ended up two lessons behind for the week.

It'll be okay. We'll dig out of the hole. We always do. It's just disheartening to be in so deep so early in the year.

On the other hand, I suppose that means we have that many more weeks to catch up, right?

So, here's what he did accomplish.

Math: He took the chapter test left over from last week (94%). He then did the first two lessons of the next chapter, Linear and Nonlinear Equations. The Number Devil chapter for this week was about rabbits and those "Bonacci" numbers.

History: He read about early settlements and the beginnings of civilization in his history atlas. He also read the opening chapters of Walking the Bible and some articles from the Learning Through History issue about the Ancient Near East. On Friday, he wrote a History Scribe page about Mesopotamia.

Reading: He's almost finished with The Cat of Bubastes. He says it's "pretty good." He's also been enjoying putting the mini book covers on his timeline.

English: We finished up Chapter 2 of English Prep 2, working through the vocabularly exercises (words beginning with "circum-" and toponyms) and the grammar and punctuation sections (adjectives, adverbs, serial commas). RobotBoy also completed his writing project for the week, a re-telling of the Egyptian creation myth about Nut and Geb.

Science: The hands-on projects were one of the casualties of the over-scheduled week. The plan is to try and make up at least one of them this week. We'll see how that goes. He did do all of his reading, though, which was one chapter of The Story of Science and the remaining chapters of Science in Ancient Egypt.

Latin: Ug. RobotBoy started the week with the best of intentions, planning to complete the whole week's assignments by Thursday and leaving Friday just in case he needed to catch up or make corrections. But it didn't work out that way. We got through most of the text pages I had planned, but he didn't touch the workbook exercise. Again, we'll try to work the leftovers into this week.

Spanish: Bueno! In addition to the listening exercises, RobotBoy had his first written work of the year. He has almost finished the section on prepositions, learning about how to say where things are in relation to other things. He's also learning about present progressive verbs.

Greek: He's begun working on the next group of six letters in Greek Alphabet Code Cracker and is continuing to use Hey Andrew! for review.

Geography: The Geography in Action lesson encouraged him to learn about some well-known landmarks and to consider the effects humans have on the physical enviroment. One of his favorite assignments was looking at a satellite map showing light patterns and thinking about what that map indicated about human populations.

Art: He completed lessons introducing the concepts of space and color. We're having a bit of a struggle with getting him to put more effort and more of himself into these assignments. This was a class he chose to do for fun, an elective, and I admit to feeling a bit frustrated with the amount of time it takes out of each day, compared to what he seems to be getting out of it. He enjoys it, but still tries to rush through and turn in kind of sloppy, careless work. And now that he's getting dinged in the grades for that lack of effort, he's angry and upset. I kind of which we could just drop the course, but he's well past the 30-day grace period. So, if he did drop it, there would be a note on his record. Since I hope he will do some FLVS courses for high school and want to be able to use them on his transcript, I'd like his record to stay "clean." At the moment, he's getting a solid B in the class, which is fine, as long as he is content with it. But I sort of wish we hadn't started it.

Other Stuff: Other than the above, he danced. A lot. He did all of his regular classes, plus rehearsals on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday. He had his second organ lesson on Thursday. So far, so good, although the teacher is having a bit of trouble tracking down appropriate lesson books. Apparently, there aren't a whole lot of young organ students, and the materials he had planned to use are out of print. I had to laugh when he told RobotBoy he was "a rare breed." Yeah, like that's news to us! We went to an organ concert on Tuesday night, which was very cool. He had his regular choir rehearsal after organ on Thursday. And he spent a very happy Saturday morning launching model rockets with dad and the other members of the local NAR club.

So, a full and productive week, all told. I can't believe we're coming up on the end of the first quarter of the year already!