Every semester there’s a week when I say “What have I done? We are so over-scheduled.” Welcome to that week. All but one of our not-at-home homeschooling activities has started, and it’s going to take me a week or two to figure out how to juggle our at-home work with the kids’ outsourced classes, sports and other activities.

Here’s a bit of what we did get done this week:

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Language Arts

We’re in the final third of “The Secret Garden,” Poppy is reading “Where the Red Fern Grows” for her literature study and Pete is reading both “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” and “The Last Dragon Charmer #2: The Quest Maker.” (Also: I am reading “John Quincy Adams: American Visionary” by Fred Kaplan, and Rockford is reading Stephen King’s “It.”)

For a kid who’s never really had homework before (or who has only had homework, if you want to look at it that way), Poppy has quite a bit of homework this weekend for her writing class. She’s working on finding the key ideas in a paragraph and then rewriting said paragraph in her own words.

Pete’s adventures in spelling have been pretty well documented here. He’s working with a spelling tutor this year. They just started, but he’s having fun with it so far. I am ever hopeful that this will be the key for him.

Math

Poppy is taking a math test this very moment. She’s been drawing angry faces at the end of every long division problem for the past two weeks, if that gives you an indication of how well she and math are getting along.

Science

This week Pete learned about the sun, did some review and wrapped things up with a science test and a project. The test didn’t go so well — there was a lot of vocabulary matching, and the difference between a meteoroid, a meteorite, a comet and an asteroid tripped him up a bit — but the project was interesting. We made a pinhole viewer out of cardboard, tape and aluminum foil, then we used it to calculate the diameter of the sun. We were around 63,000 miles off in our calculations, though. Perhaps our measurements weren’t entirely accurate.

Poppy’s Earth Science class has been studying minerals for the past couple of weeks. She’s had a little bit of homework every week, and she’s done a good job getting it done without having to rush to do it right before class.

History

The kids listened to their “Story of the World” chapter at the beginning of the week, and then we didn’t do history for the rest of the week. We’ll be revisiting this week’s chapter next week.

Extracurricular

Poppy is taking a lot of extra tae kwon do classes in an effort to be able to test for her red-black belt next month. She also has soccer practice three times a week, and she has two games this weekend.

Pete started a beginner chess class this week, and he loved it. The instructor is a Life Master, and he is very enthusiastic and engaging. Pete has been practicing The Stonewall Attack every day.

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