Year Nine, Week One

My new plan for this blog is to post weekly summaries as I find the time.  Doing this will enable me to compile some sort of year-end portfolio.  Every now and then, if I discover or learn something worthwhile, I'll document it.   This blog has always been more for my children's memories than anything else, and I want to follow through with that until we've completed this journey.

This week was a slow start.  I've always believed in not overwhelming my children with all the subjects on Day One.  Usually we do a week or two of math.  Then we add in more structure and subjects as needed.  My children start their community classes at the Y next Tuesday.   To be honest, most of this week was helping my teenagers go to bed and wake up at a reasonable hour.

We do have this new addition to our home that is somewhat messing with our sleep schedules.

My son is taking the ACT on Saturday morning, so he has been spending his 'school hours' working through practice problems.  He is in the throws of cross-county and has been encouraged with his training.  He had two meets last week.  Finally, and most importantly, he advanced a rank in Boy Scouts and earned another necessary Eagle-required merit badge. 

My daughter has faithfully worked her way through Pre-Algebra this summer.  She will begin Saxon's Algebra I next Thursday.  I am super impressed with the math knowledge she has gained.  She is not as quick or as confident as her brother is with the subject, but I believe she has far more knowledge of math than he did before beginning Algebra.  

My latest advice to home educating parents of teens has been:  If you only have one hour a day to sit down one-on-one with your student, spend that hour learning math. By this stage in the game, home educated teens can teach themselves any other subject. 

Last week, I gave myself a sizable goal of organizing many of our Alaska pictures before the school year gets underway.  If you were unaware, we spent the last two weeks of June in Alaska [and other parts of the Pacific Northwest].  We all agreed it was the best vacation ever.  It was in celebration of my parent's 50th Anniversary, which happened to be yesterday.  We have over a thousand pictures from our trip.  I'm still not sure what we're planning on doing with all of these pictures, but at least now they are all in one place.