BYU for Kids is rollin'!

Alrighty, we started Monday. And may I just pause here for a moment and share my educational moment of the day? Olivia's spelling list has "spelling dangers" - ack! commonly mispelled words. Well, whomever the experts are at this sort of thing wants us to say "all right" and not "alright". Huh, what? Is this for reals? (heh heh). I immediately look up "alright" in the dictionary. It's in there! ha! It does say it is the nonstandard form for "all right". Josh says we need an updated dictionary. Well, he may be right, buuuuut www.dictionary.com says: "Although alright is a common spelling in written dialogue and in other types of informal writing, all right is used in more formal, edited writing." So, there! Let me continue to be my informal self, alrighty? Alright!

So, how's the homeschool comin' along, you ask? Well, I do declare it is coming along fine - just fiiiiine. Monday was a long day because the kids have two extra classes to take which tack on 3.5 hrs to their day. Olivia is taking an art class and the boys are in a youngster Spanish class and Movers and Shakers (arts and crafts time). Olivia got to do a pencil drawing of still art. It was pretty cool. She even included the open door that happened to be behind it from her viewpoint, and I must say I was impressed with her use of perspective in drawing that open door! The boys made animal crafts. Fun day. We got through their lessons. Here's how it broke down.

Olivia tends to hang out in the office with Josh so he can work, teach and direct all at once! (He's a genius, I'm tellin' ya). I tend to be Ethan's teacher, because most of the work is on the computer or I'm actually teaching it to him. Right now, we're following k12.com curriculum. And, boy oh boy, am I glad to have that. It is so handy to be able to look at their week's schedule and see what lesson they are to do. Then, I just click and away we go! They do have a bunch of books and workbooks - their work is not all done the computer. But, I'm glad that I don't have to spend hours and hours preparing and researching what curriculum to use. Because, frankly, my day full enough as it is!

The k12.com curriculum itself rocks. It is very smooth, builds on itself, imaginative, includes variety of activities for the kids to do during a lesson to help reinforce the concept. I am really impressed with their phonics program. Holy cow, do they have a lot of helpful tips and activities to help your youngster read! Right now, Ethan and I are going through it at a pretty fast pace, since he has covered some of it. It may slow down as we get into combination sounds like "oi -oy". And this sound is covered pretty early on in the Kindergarten level. I doubt that Ethan has gotten this yet in his school. But, I could be wrong, and we'll see since we're doing it tomorrow.

Olivia is doing 4th grade math right now, but is covering the units pretty fast. She'll probably test out of half the course this week. (Well, she is in 4th grade now). When she took the overall assessment on math, she goofed on some things like fractions and decimals. So, that's why we got 4th grade to make sure she gets those concepts solid.

Olivia is also doing 4th grade science and history. There wasn't an overall assessment on either of these subjects, so we had to go by what she said she has learned. And frankly, it may not have been too much! For history, the public school has only been covering Florida history for the entire year. The k12.com covers global history. And science, it seems as if they haven't been doing a whole lot of it this year. Olivia says it has been boring because of lack of hands-on experiments at public school. So, that's why she's onto 4th grade science.

My overall take on homeschooling so far? It is a definite time commitment on my part. Yet, I get to actually see what Ethan and Olivia are learning. And when Ethan looks at me in the middle of a lesson with a beaming smile and climbs in my lap to snuggle, I think - awww...he gets to learn and be loved at the same time! And, I, of course, can never pass up a snuggle from my boy. At the end of the day, Josh said that he was so happy that despite his full day of work from sunup to midnight, he was still able to say that he spent enough time with his kids. That made him happy. :)