Vocabulary Word of the Day: Renegade

Song of the Day: Renegade... with bonus La Grange.

Math Improvement

Two topics in Math that produced great wailing and gnashing of teeth from the younger daughter during the first two weeks of school are now under control. She has completely mastered one and the second is well-understood and will simply require more practice for mastery. She is rightfully proud of her accomplishment.

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.