Welcome to Gaia! ::

Good luck on the dresses, sweetie! I hope you plan on posting pix?

I just finished writing up my son's 1st Grade curriculum, so I'll be spending the rest of my spare Summer time making curtains and trying not to kill my veggie garden. 1st Grade is when tests start to happen, so I'm kind of nervous about how Lucien will handle it, but I took a peek at the tests and I'm rather relieved; with some trial and error, he could probably scrape a passing grade now. The hardest exams seem to be in Religion, of all things! I'm quite happy to know that his first year of tests will be fairly easy to handle. That will shape his attitude toward testing into something more relaxed and positive - as a chance to shine rather than a week of torture. And knowing how he shuts down under stress, a positive attitude will be a great asset!

A day or two after I finished the curriculum, my hard drive died. gonk
Thank goodness, the nice people in The Geek Squad were able to do a data retrieval for me! Doing a backup was just something that never occurred to me...Boy will I be remembering from now on! Now I just have to see if the computer's still covered by extended warranty, or if I have to take it back to Best Buy again to be fixed.

So I've got the curriculum back in hand, and the school books are all ordered - hooray! Now if only I can keep him waking up around 7:30 like he is now, we can get the school days totally cranked out. School doesn't start until the last few days of August, but I'm back to being excited. I even got a set of Disney Princess Activity Books for the baby sister, so maybe this year she won't do "school work" on every flat surface she can find - with ballpoint pen...

First week of First Grade DONE! Lucien is *fabulous* at reading, but his writing looked like a Rorschach test. It looks a lot better already, but he writes sllllooooooowwwwly. So he's way behind in Penmanship. I'd worry more, but most guys I know, including Daddy, had real trouble with the whole writing thing. The more he practices, the faster he gets, and eventually he'll be more or less on par. Until then, unfortunately, he's got some extra work... He was supposed to be cranking out 5 letters (2 pages of practice each) every day, and he's been managing...oh, maybe one. Today he got in two, and we finished on time, so things are looking up.

The wee girl LOVES having her very own Princess binder full of Princess activity book pages. I tried telling her about directions, and suggesting things she could do...yeah, that worked about as well as I expected. She just colored in all the Princesses with ballpoint pen, and was happy as a clam. Just because she looks a year older than she is and has a great vocabulary doesn't make her any less a 2-year-old.

So many acquaintances have been asking me about home schooling that I finally caved and put up a Facebook note with the pros and cons of home schooling. Interest seems to peak around the time kids are starting back to school, coming home overwhelmed and exhausted, and bringing home the flu for everyone to share. Coincidence? Hmmmm.

Now for the tap-dance-inducing part of home schooling; we're taking next week off for an extended field trip to Colonial Williamsburg! We're going with my parents and my oldest sister and her brood of 5 home schooled kids, so we have an all-day private tour set up - the people doing it are pretty excited! Home schoolers generally have a reputation as being more interested and better behaved than your average class, so the people who give the tours get really excited about reaching an impressionable audience that actually listens.

We spent today's homebrew Social Studies class (it's not in my curriculum yet, but is required by my state) reading Uncle Remus stories and discussing slavery in America. You definitely will not find anything like that in regular school! Once we run out of those I think we'll try reading about the lives of children on the Western Frontier. Hooray for a great library! ...By which I mean mine. My personal library has *always* delivered better than my local public library. Shame, that.

No, actually. sweatdrop The Little Giant is unrepresented on my shelves (the founding fathers get more attention). But I do have several out-of-print first-person interviews with former slaves.

Exhibit A for why I home school: After we finished reviewing the phonograms (an easy start to the school year), Lucien got to start his new Reading textbook. He read the first 4 weeks' planned lessons in under 20 minutes and, when I explained that he was only supposed to read one page at a time (example: page 1, in its entirety, reads "a fat cat" rolleyes ), he cried and asked why the people who wrote up the lesson plan thought he couldn't read.

...We skipped that book (after I emailed the advisors in a panic and they said it was okay) and moved on to the second textbook for the year, which isn't a huge reading stretch for him either but DOES require him to answer questions in full sentences.

Oh, and those "weekly" spelling tests? We're letting him take them as he feels he's ready, which means two or more lists of words aced per week. Considering he's correcting my pronunciation of names in his favorite manga now, it really isn't a shock that he has no problem spelling three-letter words. stare

I think I might email them again and ask how old my son needs to be in order to take a placement test. I'm pretty sure those start in second grade, just like standardized testing - they aren't the same test, are they?

It wouldn't surprise me if that was the case. Or they might have a national standard at this point. All I know is that placement tests are offered to any new home school students in second grade or higher, so I assume if I ask nicely they'll let us test him just to figure out what level he *should* be learning, instead of pegging it to his age.