Homeschool: 3rd Grade has begun!
6/7/2011
I know we're some of the wackiest folks there are. Summer is just beginning and here we are, starting up our next year of homeschooling. But I consider this to be the beauty of homeschooling - starting, ending, taking breaks whenever needed or whenever it works best for our family.
For us, taking long breaks from schooling doesn't work well. Our family generally runs smoother when we have some structure to our days. Chaos ensues when there is no plan for the day, nothing at all to do... at least when we have too many days in a row like that.
So, yes, my daughter has already begun 3rd grade. We are 8 days into the new school year and so far so good.
We started a new curriculum this year - Sonlight (you can read about that decision here). I must admit that so far I am very pleased with this approach. It's slightly more time intensive than our previous materials, but seems more enjoyable for both my daughter and myself. My daughter hates math, but her math lessons are now done on the computer using a program called Teaching Textbooks. She really likes this a lot better than using the workbook approach we've done before. She couldn't wait to start this and actually picked it up and completed a few lessons when the materials arrived last month. For her to ASK to do math is a big improvement from where we were just weeks ago!
She is learning cursive writing, doing spelling tests, working through some books on early American history (Native American studies, currently), learning about poetry (like nursery rhymes), studying parts of speech (verbs and adverbs right now) and studying basic biology for science (living organisms, cells, etc). We're also all learning Psalm 8 together. All of this is part of the program through Sonlight and 8 days into it, we're enjoying school more than before.
We are taking school at a slightly slower pace, allowing my daughter (and son) plenty of outside time now that summer has truly arrived. Lest you think they are shut up indoors reciting times tables all day... they still have hours each day left for bike rides, playing with neighbor kids, and general outdoor fun.
Again, the beauty of homeschooling - we can accomplish school in a few morning hours and still have the afternoon and evening to enjoy summer fun. This would be reason #241 for why we love homeschooling! :-)
Off to finish one of the books my daughter and I are reading together for school!
2 comments:
We homeschool all year as well. We finish up the year during the summer, rather than start. My oldest son, who is 11, absolutely hates math. He has always hated math. He comes by it naturally, lol, as my husband is the same way.
One of the greatest things about homeschooling is there no need to define a grade level, and there is no pressure (at least not for us, lol) to maintain the same grade level for all subjects. We have an online curriculum, Time4Learning, for our core, and we are able to conquer math anxiety by letting my son go at his own pace. He can work in sixth or seventh grade language arts, science and social studies, but hang back in fifth grade math. He doesn't feel like he's not progressing correctly, and can take the extra time to really work through the concepts that he struggles with.
Thanks for sharing and good luck this year! :^)
Katie
I'm glad it's working well for you! (or at least it was last month when you wrote this!) We are starting Sonlight in 2 weeks and I am very excited---but a little nervous!
Post a Comment