Some School Updates

I thought I should update on our homeschool days. It has been a couple of years since I wrote about our curriculum. We have dropped some things in favor of delving more deeply into others. I no longer use any complete curriculum as I used to. It has been interesting to see how my confidence in my ability to teach our children has grown through the years of experience. My challenge now is making sure that Henry will have all requirements fulfilled so that he has every opportunity for college. I have never given grades before because they seemed unnecessary work, but I have to begin giving them for Henry. We started with math grades because that is the easiest and the younger boys all liked the grading idea and it has begun a mild though unacknowledged competition. We have begun recording more school work and by the end of the summer I feel fairly confident that I will have things planned out for the remainder of his school days, at least, the bones of it. 

I don't know if I have mentioned the fact that we use computer time as a reward. They only get a half of hour of computer time on the weekend if they accomplish all of the assigned school work. However, they can earn up to another hour by not procrastinating (having each days work done that day) and by doing certain extra assignments. History pages and maps earn them 5 minutes, a two page story including all the dress-ups required for weekly writing assignments earns 15 minutes. A full report, also including the dress-ups and sentence openers, on a topic recently studied (or related to topic studied) in history earns a full half hour. However, time on the computer can also be lost. As with any reward program, keeping track of time earned and lost is a large part of the success and integrity. We are still perfecting the matter, but it certainly has increased motivation and allows for study in areas of interest instead of purely areas assigned.

A desire to get this posted and not forget about it will necessitate my ending now. My computer time is over for the day and the posts I desire to make are many more than I am likely to ever accomplish. This is what I can do and so I will do it. 

And an old picture just because.