Homeschooling changes they way you have to navigate life’s little hiccups.   Alex got pretty sick this weekend and ended up in the ER twice for IV and then spent the night and the next day in the hospital (he’s fine).    The nice thing was that his sister got to spend Monday afternoon playing video games with him to keep him distracted and we didn’t have to worry about anyone’s schedules but our own.    On the flip side, that government sponsored babysitter (i.e. school) would have been nice as we were trying to juggle back and forth between him and the other kids and even though only one kid was sick, everything pretty much stopped for everyone.  

And now that we’re all back home, everything other than getting caught up around the house and trying to make up some quality time with the kids is put on the back burner.   Yesterday school was cuddling up reading a couple of books and playing a new math game.     Today, I’m hoping we can be a little more business as usual.

I went to a meeting yesterday with a mom whose kids are accelerating through high school, graduating early and going to college.   It was in part to get ideas for highschool and an idea of how to account for high school in a way that a college might accept, but also to find out about accelerating education in general since Aubrey is quite ahead in mathematics.

She definately had a more formal style than we do, with a very professional looking transcript and I left feeling a bit overwhelmed.   I’m not sure that we are going to go the route of “graduating” early, Aubrey will probably be interested in taking some college level science/math before too long.   She had the great advice that scholarships are for incoming freshmen so if you get a year’s worth of college credits before “graduating” you lose out on scholarship opportunities.  This I had heard before.  

 Homeschooling high school seems so much more complicated (at least at the moment, lol), but Aubrey is adamant that this is the way she wants to do it.   

So I’m torn, between wanting to formalize our academics so that they fit well in a transcript and trying to keep going as we have and somehow making it look like “high school”. 

Ack!  Makes me long for the days where my biggest issue was figuring out how to log it all!

Our last day with the puppies.  They went back to the shelter yesterday and will attend a mobile adoption event this weekend. 

Good Bye Puppies!   We’ll miss you and hope you find a wonderful family!   

I found some old business cards and turned them into math domino.   I put numbers and addition and multiplication equations on each end and they match up to either a number or a problem with the same answer (i.e. 3+3 could be matched up with 3×2 or 6 or 5+1, etc.)   It took them a while to catch on, but they got really into it after a while.  

We’re also reading Times Tables the Fun Way, and it seems to be really helping Jordan memorize the problems, which is really really hard for her.   She still has to count out for most addition and subtraction.      The Math Adlibs is still a big hit here and I’m working on both their parts of speech (a very difficult concept for both of them) and word problems.   They beg to do more and more of them.

 Alex was working in his Singapore book the other day and astounded me with a wrong answer.    The problem was   ___x3=24.    His answer was 72–figured out in his head.   So, okay, he was solving 24×3 which wasn’t the problem he was supposed to be solving, but….   I asked him how he did it and he said he figured out that 3 20′x were 60 and he knew 4×3=12 and then he added them together. 

 Jordan is also making great progress lately.   She has gone in the last few months from simple one digit addition problems (we were sticking with one operation because the different symbols were really confusing for her) to being able to do addition (multiple digit with regrouping), subtraction and multiplication.   I love it when she tells me she is great at math. 

 Our local homeschool group is participating in mathathon (www.mathathon.org) and we got our packets yesterday and they are both eager to get started.

 We’ve also been reading a lot of the mathstart readers.   Just as times tables the fun way presents information in a way that Jordan’s mind clicks with, the story format of these books has been a great way to present concepts.    We read Amazing Charts and she wants to find some information to chart now.

Add to that the “store” that they have going on buying and selling junk to eachother (with bottle caps as currency) and that is pretty much how math is looking at our house lately.

But Oh, so cute!     This is Samson and Delilah.   We’re getting into a good schedule now, and it is warming up enough that they can play outside a bit.   They’ve grown so much this week that I’m going to need to trade in my carrier with the shelter for a new one.   The kids are all really getting a lot out of this.  Unfortunately, I’m getting a bit attached to one of them in particular, so giving them back is going to be tough on me.