Homeschooling update after 33 days (147 left to go!)

Our homeschooling is, well, puttering along. It's been fairly easy to keep up and move along in math. We now have books for all the boys so it's easy to assign a set number of lessons or pages and the books do a nice job of explaining each new concept. When needed, we look up a video on Khan Academy to help explain something.

I both love and hate the Spell to Write and Read curriculum. It's just two big books and four notebooks for the kids so it's rather light (physically speaking) for a K-12 spelling curriculum. However, the system for teaching it is quite involved and intense. While all the steps are nicely laid out in the teacher's guide (over the course of 100 pages), it's challenging to implement, particularly in my case where I'm jumping in at four different levels. But then just as I'm frustrated and ready to can it for an online website they probably will learn very little from but at least we can say we did spelling, we uncover some little gem of spelling knowledge. For example, the letter x makes a double /ks/ sound and often follows rules differently as in the word anxious. The /s/ part of it's sound combines with the i to say /sh/, which helps us remember how to spell anxious. And Thomas happily points out words in his reading that follow the rules we are learning about the 5 reasons for silent e's and that English words do not end in u, i, v or j.

We have various videos and lessons for science and social studies but I'd like to find more of a textbook we can follow along to give better context to what we're learning. We're getting a lot of history from all the various sights we're seeing and I think we could spend all year learning about more each topic and putting various events in context.

We also wanted to focus on learning to type well as it's quite useful to be able to type quickly and accurately. As they reach ages where more and more assignments need to be typed, it's a time saver to type quickly!

The boys are getting more independent in their studies which is a help, but it takes my constant attention to keep all four productively occupied and even then one is often slipping off to play or getting distracted.

We are certainly getting more into the swing of things!