Back Again

Well, here we are at the end of the first week of our second semester. It’s going surprisingly well, although we had to make a sacrifice to get here.

Here’s the big confession (which I’ve already shared with my friends over at the WTM boards): We’re dropping Latin for the rest of this year.

I know. I can hear you all gasping with disbelief.

Here’s what happened: RobotBoy really enjoyed Latin as long as we were doing the reading-based curricula. Learning Latin Through Mythology was an especially big hit. We’ve pretty much exhausted the only similar materials I can find, though, that seem like a comfortable fit for him. There are more programs that take a reading approach, but they seem to kick in mostly at the high school level. And we’re just not there yet.

We like the English Prep series from Galore Park, so we thought we’d try their Latin Prep curriculum. It was not going well. RobotBoy just didn’t seem to be retaining or understanding as much as I had hoped. So, at some point, I decided to drop back and aim to finish only the first half of the book this year. Then we got very busy and dropped back into “only the basics” mode for a few weeks before the holidays. And Latin just didn’t get done at all.

Then I had some chat with my student about how things are going for him and what we could do next year to make school more interesting. And he would prefer to kick up the challenge level a bit but streamline the number of subjects. He wants to continue Spanish and Greek, so we agreed to let Latin fall away. At that point, it seemed just plain silly to worry about doing half of a book we’re not likely to finish in the future. So, Latin is off the menu for now.

The good news is that, with Latin off the planner and the FLVS art class finished, we have much more time available to catch up on the stuff that got neglected in the second half of last semester. And we just have more breathing room, which, I suppose, may be why this week has been more pleasant than I anticipated.

Math:
This is another subject in which we fell behind before the holidays. In order to finish the course as scheduled, we now have to complete six lessons each week. It’s a tall order, but RobotBoy is tackling it pretty cheerfully. This week, he did the section on Systems of Linear Inequalities (which involved lots of looking at graphs) and started working on Properties of Exponents. He continues to like the course and earn very good grades. I think this should put him in a great place to do geometry next year.

History & Literature:
This semester kicked off with another very cool field trip, The First Emperor: China’s Terra Cotta Army at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. Moonheart came along for the ride, since we were taking her back to campus. She gave the exhibit thumbs up, too. The exhibit was a wonderful way to jump start the semester, since it dovetailed nice with RobotBoy’s current reading. He also watched a DVD from Netflix about the life of China’s first emperor before we went to the museum. He’s working his way through the Nature Company Discoveries book Ancient China and has read several articles from the Learning Through History issue. He also read the pages in the Atlas of World History about the Great Wall, the terracotta army, the Han Dynasty and the silk road. His literature reading for the week included selections from The Ch’I Lin Purse: A Collection of Ancient Chinese Stories and the Oxford book of Tales From China.

We’re just a touch off kilter because of the need to catch up in some areas. So, his Child’s History of the World story for this week was about the Trojan war. He followed that up with a History Scribe page about the Trojan horse. Ah well, it’ll all come together eventually, right?

English:
We are having to pick up a little slack in this subject, too. So, this week we did the pages on demonstrative and relative pronouns and reviewed comma usage. We also read an excerpt from Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree and answered the comprehension questions. Independently, RobotBoy did two lessons of Word Roots.

Science:
RobotBoy read two chapters from The Story of Science this week, which got him caught up. I thought it was cool that the chapter on Hero and Alexandria happened to fall just when we’re finishing listening to the third Bartimaeus book. (RobotBoy read them over the summer and insisted I would love them. We’ve been listening to the audio versions on road trips, and they really are a lot of fun.) He also read a chapter of Archimedes and the Door of Science and did a project from the ancient Greece chapter of Ancient Science.

Latin:
Sigh. (See above.)

Spanish:
He finished the section on plurals and moved on to pronouns this week. He did well on the ejercicios.

Greek:
In Hey, Andrew! Teach Me Some Greek! RobotBoy is practicing the words he’s learned so far, going back and forth from English to Greek. He’s doing a little catch-up work in Greek Alphabet Code Cracker, reviewing the sounds of the Greek letters. Hey, Andrew! seems to be a good fit for him. We’re planning to continue with the program next year.

Geography:
The current module is about Latin America, and the week’s lessons were about “Society and Family Life” and “Land Use and Change.” RobotBoy continues to enjoy and do well in the course. I’m not sure how much he’s retaining, but it’s a start.

Other Stuff:
All of the extracurriculars have come back into play since the beginning of the month. So, we’re back into the weekly round of tap, ballet, organ, choir, ballet, character. If all goes well, he may be adding a ballroom dance class on Monday afternoons beginning later this month. I’m still frustrated with the amount of organ practice he’s not doing and kind of at my wit’s end to figure out how to fix that problem. But, all in all, things are going well.

My New Challenge:
I’ve decided to join a group of folks from the WTM boards in challenging myself to read 52 books in 52 weeks this year. That is, to be honest, not a huge number of books for me to read, but the rules say that we can’t count things we read for school. We are allowed to count things we’ve read before, as long as it hasn’t been too recent. But my own personal goal is to make the majority of the books I choose for this year classics I’ve somehow missed or things that are in some way more of a challenge for me. In other words, I don’t want to be lazy about this. We are in our third week of the challenge, and so far I’ve read Bel Canto, by Anne Patchett (because Moonheart nagged me into it), In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote (because it was on one of the Modern Library’s “best of” lists and I saw a used copy for $1) and Joy in the Morning, by Betty Smith (because I hadn’t read it since I was a teenager and I needed something more uplifting after the first two).

Of course, this challenge, combined with the B&N buy-two-get-one-free sale on their classics line, has given me an excuse to go on a small buying spree. So, waiting in the wings are Sense and Sensibility (again, a re-read, but one I haven’t done in a few years), Mansfield Park (ditto), Pygmalion and Three Other Plays, Sister Carrie, Barchester Towers and Wings of the Dove.

I haven’t yet participated, but there is a blog to which some of my fellow book-a-weekers are contributing reviews and comments: http://read52booksin52weeks.blogspot.com/ It’s fun to see the diversity of both subject matter and opinion. I’ll keep you posted on how I’m doing.