So far so good on the Facebook fast. I’ve caught myself a couple times defaulting to the website, by accident. I just closed it up and did something else. I have to check the group I moderate about twice a day, so I bookmarked a direct link.
The BILLY bookcases are filling up so quickly Sean told me to get two more. They’ll come next week, I’m still deciding where to put them. There’s room on that wall, but I have a giant world map that I want to put there. Those two are almost all homeschool books, with more to come.
We got a Memoria Press catalog last week with some penmanship material I ordered (they seem to have the best cursive program for an older student.) Sean really likes their curriculum but there is no way I could manage it, nor do I want to. I told him he needs to trade us in for a new family, sorry. I’m all in for Bookshark. He relented.
This year has gone well so far, speaking of Bookshark. We are on week 25 of Levels 3 and 6. A typical day is: wake the kids by 9:30 if they aren’t awake, though usually most are, eat breakfast, check in with each kid for their scheduled work for the day and what needs to be done, or questions from yesterday’s work. Then off they go. We have two computers that they use for Teaching Textbooks, so there’s usually no waiting, and they all have their own books for the other subjects.
I tried once to have Faith and Abby share a Sonlight Core and it was unpleasant, so now if two kids are in the same level I buy two of everything but read-alouds. Used copies means it only costs a little more than new.
While the big kids are working independently, I get Dorothy set up. She’s learning to read and write this year, with a mix of Reading Eggs and paper books, and Handwriting Without Tears. It takes about ten minutes with me and however long I let her do Reading Eggs. She does read-alouds too, but those are with her daddy at night.
The big kids check in with me as they finish each item, math, history, a chapter of a novel, and science. (We completely dropped the science experiments, sigh. Nobody was into it and it was a lot of work. I think next year will be better, it’s robotics!) They also write at least a page a day in their journals, for our unstructured language arts.
We also have a read-aloud going most of the time, which I read about every other day, to save my voice.
And on Tuesday they do homeschool drama class and PE.
Everyone’s done in a few hours and then they are free!