Plugging along

Remember when school started in September?  These days, I don't think we get past the first week of August before cute "first day of school" pictures fill my facebook new feed and instagram.  As for my little homeschooling clan, we just keep plugging along.  But in honor of school starting for everyone else, I will do a little school update on my students.

Jake will be 7 and a half this month and never ceases to amaze me with the way he both retains and comprehends information!  Another homeschooling mom asked me just the other day, "How is Jake so smart?!?"  I laughed it off when she asked, but as I have said countless times before, he just came that way.  He has been blessed with an incredible mind!

He has fallen in love with reading this past year, and I half jokingly say that my job with him is done.  But really, once you can read, you really can teach yourself anything so I feel like it is an exciting milestone in his life!  Every time I see him nose deep in a book my heart is happy!  I am not exactly sure what his reading level is, but I would guess early middle school.  He flies through books at a rapid rate and has already enjoyed classics by Jake London and Mark Twain (they were adapted versions, so he still has the real ones to look forward to in several years).  He also loved the Shiloh trilogy and we have been reading quite a bit of historical Christian fictions together, but his current favorite is anything related to ancient Greece and their mythology.

As for math, we have stuck with the Saxon program and he is working on the beginning of the 4/5 curriculum.  While most of it is review for him so far, I like that he is able to do nearly all of it independently.  I think he is enjoying taking a break from long division and multiplication using extended form for a little while we brush up on the basics.  The lessons are longer, but I see his conference growing as works through the lessons with little to no assistance from me.  I guess that is what we parents do, work ourselves right out a job, right?  Maybe he will need me again when he gets to algebra.

James started the Hooked on Phonics program this summer and is catching on quite quickly!  We just finished the first half of the kindergarten level where he learned words with short a and i sounds.  He will almost always have a big sigh when I say it is time to read, but with in seconds of snuggling up with our lesson he is all smiles.  He really enjoys when he can "sound them out in my mind," so he can just say them without verbally blending the sounds together.  There are so many times I feel like a crazy person for homeschooling, but moments like this, I remember that there is no other option for us.  I want to be a part of all their childhood first...listening to him read his first words is just as wonderful as it was to watch him take his first steps.

James appears to have a math brain.  He understands numbers and the way they work together.  While one shouldn't compare their children, Jake is my only point of reference.   As Jamie makes his way through the Saxon 1 book, I have been surprised several times when we come to concepts that I remember Jake struggling with that click with James right away.  Just like his older brother, James has been blessed with an incredible mind, but I love that they appear to have unique strengths.

In the "real world" James wouldn't be starting Kindergarten until the following year, but I can't imagine him waiting that long!  He has been doing school along side his big brother since he was a baby.  Not because I expected him to, but because he wanted to.  I think that is one of the great part about this life, the "school" part is just part of life, the same way meals and playing are or catching bugs and getting in trouble for playing ball in the house is.  I hope that my children are learning that learning is not something you do in one place and a certain time in you life, but that it should be a part of our life each and every day even if the "flow" that I dream of looks more like roaring rapids than a gentle stream.

Homeschool is definitely not the easiest thing.  There are many times Jake gets frustrated with me because I am helping too much or not enough (basically he just gets frustrated when he doesn't get it perfect on the first try).  I lose my patience more often than I would like to admit (mostly when I feel like I am not balancing all of my life responsibilities perfectly...I guess those cute dimples aren't the only thing he inherited from me.  James often melts down when he has to put his toys down for scripture study, and Scarlett...well, Scarlett adds an extra set of challenges to any lesson.  But we are all learning, and the longer I do this the more I see the life lessons we are learning between the math, through the reading, and under the forts made of blankets that I always end up cleaning up...