Lauren is going to be thrilled to death… For the first time in our 5 year homeschooling history she will get a 6 week bookwork break for the Holidays—
We do not celebrate the holidays like normal people do, so we are going to be doing some major Holiday oriented Unit studies on why we do not celebrate them the way others do. We will be going over quite the variety of materials for Christmas, including the Ultimate gift.
We will also be limiting the number of TEXT books we will be using for her spring semester, I have NEVER liked using books, but this year was different and while we will finish the curriculum we have purchased, I do not think we will buy most of it again, we are not a text book family, and I can see its really held her learning back this year as I have been evaluating where she is and has been.
We started off this year supposed to be starting Second Grade, I did a placement test because we were starting a new curriculum and I wanted to place her in the appropriate level for their curriculum…Lo and Behold, she placed in 3rd grade and a little higher in some subjects…I was a very happy mom. Unfortunately, while she started off gung ho and worked really efficiently in August, September moved a bit slower, by October I was hearing almost every day, This is boring and I don't like this work… before I get slammed with "you're the boss" comments or emails, remember, I know my child best, and I have looked at her work, I have looked at this work she is doing She is VERY justified in being bored with it and it's just not at her level in any way, even though the book says 3rd grade some of them even as far as the 4th month of 3rd grade, they just do not hold her interest because they are mostly reading, she has been reading for 4 and a half years, I figured since these were 3rd grade books there would be grammar and stuff in them by now, but this has barely covered nouns and she is bored to tears with basics still.
We will be switching gears to Note booking and using the resources in our text books for this next semester (and eliminating a lot of useless information that she already grasps…so, I will be doing A LOT of hands on work with her, but that's fine with me…it will be fun for us both) We will be doing ONE 2" Binder for 3rd grade and I will decide if we will do a new one for each grade or what we will do, it will depend on how I like note booking and how it works for us basically, its lap booking simplified, so we will be taking a bit of time to work through a portfolio of sorts…if you read my earlier post, I feel God is leading my heart to prepare, for some reason I also feel at some time in the future he may be moving us and I am not sure where, but if he moves us to a not so home school friendly state, I need a portfolio ready to go, because those records need to be kept for them…yes, Michigan does not require them, but not every state is as blessed as we are.
So, Unit Studies, here we come, Math and Language Arts, Back to the Basics, Here we come, Everything else, can be covered in a unit study, I am not going to try to cover things in individual books, it's too much work and I felt we lost a lot of ground and school became a war, and Frankly, I prefer not fighting a war not worth fighting…She is a smart kid, VERY Smart, so why am I losing the battle here?
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