Math Malpractice

When your kids bring home As in math from a private school, you kind of presume that they are doing OK in math. Well, I presumed that, anyway, so part of the blame for the situation is mine. It turns out that the school was, shall we say, less than rigorous in the teaching of math and, apparently, in the standards to which students were held.

The bad news is that we have some ground to make up in math. The good news is that my daughters are way more than smart enough to make up the ground and get where I think they should be. The better news is that the younger daughter took it upon herself to make a box for cards with math problems on them to make practice more fun.

Week One

The core subjects take just a little longer than I expected, but they are still in the ballpark. The classical approach stuff we have done so far has been so different from what they are used to -- and so much fun -- that implementing more of it next week will probably be pretty popular.

We're going to start the classical history while continuing the logic, Latin, and vocabulary material. After that, we'll add in the classical language and reading and then balance the workload from there.

So far, so good.

Penmanship...

... important subject or the equivalent of learning to make buggy whips? I tend toward the latter but, then again, I was never all that worried about writing neatly.

Magnum est imperium Romanum!

The first chapter of Latin was way more popular than I expected. We haven't even gotten to the second chapter, where it seems like the more entertaining stuff would be, and they are already excited reading about large and small rivers, towns, and islands. They also thought it was cool reading some examples of where we get singulars and plurals like cactus/cacti and radius/radii and figuring out the relationship between a new Latin word, magnus, and a word they knew, magnify.

And, yes, the Tiberis flows right through Rome, sed non est magnus.

Day One

That went well. We covered the core curriculum in about 4.5 hours including some extra math practice to get back in the swing of things, took an hour and half lunch break, then did a lot of good vocabulary work/discussion all in less time than they would have been in school, let alone transportation time.

The lunch will get shorter and we'll work in more stuff in the afternoons but it was a smooth transition away from summer vacation and into homeschooling.

Does mobile blogging work? I guess we'll find out.

It Doesn't Take Much

Who knew that being able to get their report cards printed in their favorite colors -- purple and bright green -- would have been so entertaining?

T-7 Days and Counting

OK, so in less than a week I'll begin homeschooling the daughters. We'll have a lot of subjects to cover. Latin. Logic. Language. Math, Science, History, unraveling the mysteries, that all started with the big bang! Or something like that.

I still need to sort out some curriculum questions and figure out a spiffy lesson plan and schedule but it should all come together soon.

I'll be doing all of this without having been an education major, without ever having been a student teacher, without having a teaching certificate, and with with zero (0) hours of teaching-related courses.

Yeah, I know that's not particularly rare for homeschooling, I just wanted to tie in to the blog's title.