Four Weeks In Evaluation - What's Working, What Isn't

What's Working
Lively Latin is a big hit here. The visual layout of the material is wonderful, it contains clear explanations, and I'm actually loving the printing-as-we-go feature. Eclectic Girl has a great attitude about studying Latin and most days finishes her assigned work faster than the given amount of time. Awesome!

Spencerian Penmanship. EG is truly enjoying this, and volunteers to practice each day. I'm loving that I don't have to supervise this subject at all, due to her intense motivation. Spencerian cursive is, above all, pretty, and EG does love pretty.

Writing Tales 2. EG is being stretched to add more detail to her rewrites and to apply grammar. I also love the dictionary work, key word outlines, and work with synonyms. I've already started looking through the next step (Classical Writing: Homer), and I can tell EG will be well-prepared for it.

Life of Fred. This is the most amazing math series and I credit it with returning to EG her love of math. The style is perfect for her, as she loves to read and has an intuitive grasp of mathematical concepts. She's flying through Decimals and Percents, and she'll start Beginning Algebra in mid-November.

TOPS Science modules. EG has almost completed the entirety of the Electricity module. I love it! We're set to tackle Magnetism next. These modules are letting her use her intuitive sense to "get" physics concepts. I wish I'd started using these sooner!

Right Start Level A. This is perfect for FB. He has a great time with all the manipulatives and games, and it's helping him develop his own math intuition. I need to be more consistent with it (and find our Yellow Is The Sun CD), but I do love the program.

The Logic Countdown series from Prufrock Press. EG has sped through the first book and a half of this three book series. I love the variety of problems presented.


What's Working: Things Kash Pulled Together
The MOTH-inspired daily schedules. I anticipated some balking, but instead EG and FB both adore them. I love them, too, because it's not Mom saying what to do, it's the Schedule. It's hard to argue with a piece of paper encased in a sheet protector. :)

Our history pages. Each week, there's a new page, listing reading in her spine (Story of the World Volume 4), reading in supplemental resources, assigned living books (histories and biographies), the week's mapwork, and any writing and/or memorization assignments. I'm so glad I invested the time to prepare these. I'll definitely be doing them in future years, as well as going back to lay out a similar schedule for Story of the World volumes 1-3 for FB and PC.

Memory work. We're finally getting this done consistently. We are using Linguistic Development Through Poetry Memorization from IEW for poetry, and it's the only source of memory work for FB at this point, but for EG, I'm adding in history work, additional poetry, daily Latin review (vocabulary as well as various chants), grammar definitions, and starting in a few weeks, some terms for physics. Once I put it on the schedule and decided to make it a priority, it finally started coming together.


What's Not Working
Our literature list is so far overwhelming EG. While she's certainly capable of reading everything that's been assigned, she started the year with one of the longest works she'll read all year (Little Women), and then followed that, two weeks later, with a week in which multiple books were to be read. I hope that once we hit week six (week five is a shortened week), she'll have found her 'stride,' so to speak.

Similarly, literature analysis and discussion is not happening. I need to make more of an effort to use the various resources we have - Deconstructing Penguins and various free literature guides online.