Homeschool Wrap Up Week 10

The cooler temperatures have hit Arkansas.  That has been quite an adjustment for my younger children switching from always wearing shorts and running barefoot in the yard to long pants and shoes.  I just caught my 8 year old trying to go out this morning in a tank top, shorts, and no shoes, it is only 49 degrees right now.

I can't believe we are ten weeks into our school year and more than halfway through October.  We had a good and productive week this week.  There was one day I had to be gone to visit a friend in the afternoon so I cancelled all afternoon school work besides Math.

We are still having great fun with Apologia's Exploring Chemistry and Physics.  There are so many hands on activities, the children love it!  After the review period is over we will be setting it aside for awhile to finish up Apologia Land Animals, but we will get back to it if not this year, then next year.

This week in IEW we shifted from nonfiction to writing fiction.  The boys are creating a story similar to The Boy Who Cried Wolf.  This story has to have three paragraphs instead of one with requirements for each paragraph.  We spent all last week working on it, and will finish it up this week.

The only other new thing that really happened in our school work this week was that Christian started showing a bit of frustration in his reading, so instead of pushing forward we paused where we were in AAS/AAR and just took a couple of days to just go back and review.  I think seeing all of the words and sounds he already knows how to read built his confidence up.  We will see how this week goes to decide if we should move forward or just spend some more time on review.  That is one of the great things about homeschooling, the ability to cater to your child's needs.

Some of you may wonder why I don't talk a lot about my High Schooler in my weekly wrap up.  The truth is that she is entirely in control of her own schedule.  I think time management is a skill that teen agers need to learn and I expect her to handle her work on her own.  She has a deadline for when everything has to be completed, and how she accomplishes that is up to her.  Some weeks she will focus on certain subjects each day: like completing all of her weekly science on Monday, Math on Tuesday, etc.. Or sometimes she does each subject everyday.  It just depends on her.  I don't care how it gets done, as long as it gets done.  She even grades her own Math.  I grade the other subjects because they are a bit more subjective.

This week, I finally received an email from the Arkansas Department of Education stating I am legal to homeschool.  This is the first year they have done registration online.  I tired out the online registration this year, but will not be doing that again until it becomes mandatory.  I did NOT like the process.  I did NOT like the wording that they used that your paperwork has to be "approved" as in Arkansas it does not have to be approved, it just has to be filled out and sent in.  I did NOT like that it took more than 2 months to get this "approval" email.  I do not think this is going in a good direction, and is going against homeschooling law in Arkansas.  We will see if they make adjustments/changes to make the process better before it becomes mandatory.

I hope you had a great week in your homeschool!