Three Days Down

"Hey, Mama. Nine is five and four!" So said Fabulous Boy yesterday as we headed home from co-op open house. If you've used Right Start math, you might guess the origin of his statement, but what thoroughly impressed me was that we haven't discussed nine as a quantity yet. We're only up to eight, which means he had to extrapolate to reach that conclusion.

I've settled upon calling this our Emeril year of homeschooling. In other words, it's time to "kick it up a notch." For the first time, FB is having regular, scheduled school time with me, covering phonics, handwriting, and math. We read a lot of books, too, so he'll touch upon not just literature but also history and science through those books. He's asked for a math book "like Sissy;" Right Start Level A just doesn't have much written work (which I, silly Mom, thought was a point in its favor), so I'm on the hunt for an inexpensive workbook series that he will complement what he's learning in Right Start. I'm going to try to take a look at Singapore, and I've had a recommendation to look at Math Mammoth.

"Kick it up a notch" takes on a different look entirely with regards to Eclectic Girl. Being in fourth grade, The Well-Trained Mind would consider her in her last year of grammar stage, but as the authors acknowledge, kids will enter the logic stage at different times. It became readily apparent in the spring that in the areas where she had not already been doing logic stage-type thinking, she was quickly entering it. Our expectations of her have risen accordingly and she seems ready for the challenge. The first day went extraordinarily smoothly, we had only a few hiccups on the second day, primarily due to fatigue, I think, and today (the third day), we've managed to work ahead of our schedule.

The schedules are new. Over a year ago, I had purchased Managers of Their Homes. It's an extremely Christian book, to the point that I couldn't separate the wheat from the chaff the first time I read it. I went through it again this summer, though, with a great big filter in my mind, and I began to see how scheduling could help things run more smoothly here, especially as I added a second student. So I completed the process, and we have beautiful, color-coded schedules, one for each day. I warned everyone that they were guidelines, and that not everything on the schedules would happen every day. That's true. On the other hand, a vast majority of it is getting accomplished, which is something amazing, indeed.