First Day of School

We started school last Monday. This is our third year of homeschooling. Three years…That makes me a pro now right? I feel like it's become such a normal thing. It's not overwhelming (outside of actually buying all my books), I pretty much know what curriculum we will use each time (most of that is thanks to being homeschooled myself for 8 years) and I generally can get us through the school day without incident. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure I still have much to learn and I know next year will be more annoying as I'll officially have to do the paper work and sign the affidavit and all that jazz.

Anyway….

As I've mentioned before, this year we beefed up Logan's schooling and now that Ransom is in the "real" grades (aka not Kindergarten) he has more school too. I was curious as to how they would handle the new work load. Naturally they of course seem to love it. How many more years do I have before they dread school?

We added on grammar and vocabulary to Logan's workload. So far the grammar has been fun and rather easy but it's 2nd grade grammar so I wouldn't expect anything too crazy. Vocabulary will be interesting. It's definitely going to be a challenge for Logan and for the first time in his school life, he's actually going to need to really apply himself instead of just breezing by with an A. However, despite the difficulty Logan loves it. In fact, currently grammar and vocabulary are his two favorite subjects. Granted he seems to love all his school work. The boy clearly does not take after his mother.

Now Ransom learns differently than Logan. Logan is like his dad, he can learn something, soak it up, and have it memorized in an instant. I almost do not need to teach the kid because he'd learn on his own. Ransom I actually have to teach. I have to work with. This of course is not a bad thing but it means that he has to adjust to not learning things as fast as Logan. In fact, I think the speed of learning is one thing that causes him to just guess the answers (for instance he'll see a word with a S and guess that it's slide instead of sounding it out and finding out it's slip.) He can clearly sound the words out but he just wants to get the answer so fast that he just jumps to conclusions. In any case, he's doing great with the work load so far. He still begs to to phonics first, despite phonics being one of the harder subjects for him. He took his first spelling test and did great. I'm really excited to see if he'll love reading as much as Logan (and the rest of us) when he gets more proficient at it toward the end of the year.

Everly, of course, isn't in school yet but she has an old school workbook that she's scribbled in last year and has picked it up again. We get into the room to do school and Everly instantly grabs her workbook, gets a pencil, and starts adding to her scribbles. Eventually I'll get her something so she can actually learn her letters, numbers, etc but for now I'm fine with this routine. Besides, since she has a November birthday she won't be starting Kindergarten until she's 3 months shy of 6! (this seems totally crazy to this April birthday mama by the way) So I have a good 3 years before I even need to worry if she's prepared for Kindergarten. How insane is that?

Oddly it's Verity who is having the hard time with school. There's only so much a baby can do on her own and while school is over in just 2 hours she has a hard time being a happy baby when all her siblings are not playing with her. Hopefully, she will adjust to the schedule soon or at very least become  more independent and learn how to let us do school for a couple hours.

1 week of school done, 35 more to go...