Did I Mention It's Almost Break Time?

After eight years of homeschooling, we've developed a yearly schedule that works well for us. We do about six weeks of school then take one week off. Thanksgiving and Christmas kind of mess with that system, but it averages out by the end of May.

I was inspired by the British system of school terms, which is what we have at our school, fall, winter, and spring terms of 12 weeks each. This is why we start back the first week of August, it's generally too hot to do much outside anyway. We're done by the end of May, mostly.

So, we've completed five weeks so far, start the sixth tomorrow, then get a week off. It's not really a week off. It's more of a time to sleep in, catch up some projects, and do some administrative work. In common vernacular, this is when I tweak stuff.

I also bought water balloons on clearance this week. Which means it will now cool off too much to use them. A friend suggested using hot water, that sounds good to me. We have a deck, so our Battle of Waterballoon should be very interesting.

The academic highlights so far have been reading Gilgamesh, getting solid grades on Japanese and Russian tests, and an increased ability in writing. I've had to tweak our math program, why is it always math? Every year I have one subject that messes us up. Math is it this year. The instruction in Singapore's Discovering Mathematics isn't adequate for Z. We're working on a variety of skills with math, and DM, while a good program, doesn't work well for him. We in the processing of moving to another publisher, which I think will help. We'll know more after this week.

Our weekly schedule instead of a block schedule is doing well. We still have the timing issue of writing and math taking larger portions of the day. During my tweaking time, I'm going to be looking at our schedule further to see what we can do. The main plan is to remain flexible and prioritize where we need to stay on task and where we can slow down a little. Having a productive day is better than rushing through subjects.

I can't believe we've completed five weeks already. The time is flying by, I'm working to enjoy the good moments and not think about how quickly the rest of the next four years will go.