Spring Planning

I've just been too frustrated to blog lately. That's because I go blog chasing and get disgusted at what I read. (Pro-Pearl garbage.)

School's been going well. We're over that awful spring-fever hump and going strong. I sat down today with a fresh quarter calendar and our books just to map things out a little. I'm not big on doing X the 23rd, Y the 24th, Z the 25th. We take our time with each subject, slowing down if we want to study further, speeding up and covering only the basics if it's boring. Of course we get sidetracked a lot, especially with science. Not sidetracked, but something piques Tommy's interest and we go off on that tangent. And that's okay by me. =)

It looks as if we are going to finish everything by the end of May. Yes!

Much to my son's dismay, though, I've announced we're doing summer school lite. I've talked about it all year so he knew it was coming. He's very upset. Tommy even asked me today if he could do all his work independently on the weekends so he could be finished a couple weeks earlier. lol Yeah, but...we're still doing summer school. With breaks, though. I certainly don't want to do school every single day.

For the summer I'm planning on continuing with math. It's going well but for math facts. Why is it that a child can pass a 100-problem-timed test several days in a row on his math facts and then wake up one morning and all those facts have escaped his brain? Why? WHY? See mom cry. See mom banging her head on the kitchen table. We will drill, practice, play math fact games until they NEVER escape his brain again. Hopefully.

Also on the schedule is a writing program. I didn't actually buy a new program for summer, I'm going to teach him about some of the different types of writing and then have him start outlining and writing five-paragraph essays. I might also have him do the American History writing program (forget the name, but it's by the Logos school) that I bought and we never used. Ahem. I hope my husband doesn't find out about that, he'll get ticked. He thinks I spend too much on school.

Finally on the summer agenda, science and lots of it. I'm still in the beginning planning stages, but I see lots of mini-units in our future. Lots of outside nature stuff. Lots of experiments. My son has requested a garden. We still have plenty of time to plan the garden, we still have snow on the ground -- plus it snowed again today.

Might throw in a weather station, too. Oh, and astronomy...oh the possibilities.

We tore up the check to Uncle Milton's and have decided to order our hermit crabs from Carolina Biological instead. We're going to be ordering a butterfly kit too. Hopefully we'll find some tadpoles at one of our lakes.

I like the planning stage as much as the carrying-it-out part. My plan is to make summer school seem as if it's not school at all, but lots of fun. If only I could make math fun.