Homeschool Changes

As you can tell I have not kept up on updating this blog or my cooking one. Life has gotten unexpectedly crazy busy. However my goal for July is to update this blog at least 3 times a week and the cooking blog at least once a week. I haven't finished posting pictures from our vacation and I promise I will get a few more posted at some point but I am moving one for now.

After a very rough year homeschooling last year we gave some serious thought to sending the boys to a charter school or the local school. Well after taking yet another tour of the local school I knew that was not an option at this point. Have you ever been seriously concerned about your local school? I am. The turnover rate in kids is high. The principal said only about 25% of kids who start the school year end the school year there. As such their test rates are quite low. Now I"m not all that concerned about test scores but when your soon to be 2nd grader can do math and science that the 6th grader who goes to the local school hasn't learned yet it makes you wonder. So for the time being we are homeschooling again.

Which brings me to change. What we have been doing is NOT working. I hate school, the boys are hating school, and some days only the basics are getting done. So I have completely changed the way we will be schooling for the upcoming year. We will be focusing in on science (which has been thrown to the curb and not done much) and history (which seems to be loved my the kids). Yes we will still have math, reading, language arts, spelling, grammar, and all the other requirements to learn. But I will be folding them into science and history as much as possible. Another thing I really want to do is have the boys together for as many subjects as possible so I'm not spending two hours with Nathan, two hours with the twins, and another two hours with everyone together. Hopefully this works well for all of us.

First item on the change list is writing. We don't write much because we never seem to have time. So I am buying a game titled Create a Story and Friday's we will be playing the game and getting started on a story. I plan on giving them until the next Thursday to work on their stories and Friday's before playing another round of the game we will be reading the stories out loud. Hopefully this will add some "fun" into writing and school and give us some of the fun we need to get school done this year.

I'll be sharing another change hopefully tomorrow or Thursday.