Monday’s News From the Trenches

In general, we’re good homeschoolers on Mondays. I feel ready to hit the ground running, these days Jason is off on Mondays, and our only out-of-the-house commitment is in the evening. Snowy and bitterly cold Mondays are even better.

I’ve decided to really accelerate the Ambleside Online schedule of Our Island Story. At their rate it takes years to get through the book. Charlotte Mason believes in slow digestion of facts, but I also would like to study other histories other than British sometime before my kids hit high school. Also, it’s just good reading. So, our more bookish homeschooling days are going to be Mondays, Wednesday, and Fridays this term, and I plan to read one chapter from OIS each of those days. 50 Famous Stories Retold complements these readings nicely, so we’re doing both together once or twice a week.

We’re continuing with our small group geography study of Around the World in 80 Days. It’s really an enjoyable book. We’re also reading about three chapters per week of that, more or less. We started Farmer Boy as our family read aloud, and are trying to do five chapters a week or so of that.

Math is going well. We’re pretty steady at one lesson per day for both boys. I think we’re almost to the point where they each “should” be–neither too difficult nor too easy (when it’s too easy we work through two or so exercises at a sitting). On Karen’s recommendation I ordered Times Tales last night and am looking forward to receiving that to work through with Quinn.

Latin is also progressing nicely. Again, we only do three short lessons per week, but they’re retaining more and finally starting to understand gender agreement and such. Today they were tickled to read that one of the characters (based on real people) was reprimanded for sloppy school work–something they both think I’m too picky about.

But because den meetings for their Cub Scout Pack fall on Mondays, most of Mondays seem to be devoted to badge work. Today Liam blew through about 1/3 of his Tiger Cub requirements, and Quinn is currently out working on spending some money so he has something to track in his budget. Quinn also got the chess (loop or badge?) requirements out of the way today with a fun game of Lego Chess. Liam’s den is doing a field trip to a Spanish radio station this afternoon, and I figure they can’t kick Quinn out so we’ll sneak in a little homeschooling trip for both of them.

Shockingly, my house is relatively clean, too. Of course I’ve not done any work, yet, but then two out of three is really all you can ever expect, isn’t it.