Trudging On

Greek to me

After taking an extended Christmas break, we have returned to our regular schooling schedule. We have less than 75 days left in his sophomore year, but it feels like it can't end soon enough. This year EM has been working on geometry, physics, English, American government, art, physical education, and what I'm calling 'life skills' for his school subjects. I thought I'd give a bit of a description of what we have been doing since I've fallen off the boat as far as keeping this blog updated.

We are using Thinkwell again this year for EM's math instruction. He is studying geometry. He should wrap the complete course up in another month. Since we will continue schooling until the end of April, I think we will supplement with a series of workbooks I have, Key to Geometry, to reinforce what he has already learned and do a little more hands-on construction.

For physics, EM completed a class on Coursera in the first few months of school. This course uses the textbook How Things Work: The Physics of Everyday Life. In the course, only the first two sections of the book are covered, so since then, EM has continued his study of physics using the textbook. We started running into trouble though. Other than the Coursera class, I have never studied physics. I wasn't much good at teaching it either. Thankfully my husband has a good understanding of these things and jumped in as physics instructor.

English is often EM's biggest struggle. We continued his study of grammar using the website English Grammar 101. He is also working on writing assignments. He wrote a short paper on Lafayette and is currently writing a 2500 word fictional story that takes place in the world of a one of his favorite video games. We will need a few more writing assignments to meet the requirements for the PHAA diploma program. He is now in the Wednesday night devotional rotation for our church congregation, so that meets his speech requirements. The final component of our English course is reading. He read a few classics I assigned and also does a daily Bible reading.

American government is a textbook based study. We go over the reading together, have some discussion, and there are questions and activities that he completes. As we get toward the end of the year, he will also take the online citizenship practice test.

For art he completed 60 activities, working on projects of his own, watching BrainPOP videos about famous artists, and completing their quizzes.

Physical education has consisted of daily workouts and homeschool gym class on Friday mornings.

Finally life skills has been a two part course. The first half of the year was spent on cooking. He had a checklist of different meals he wanted to learn to cook. First I'd show him, then he'd make it with me watching, and the third time would be on his own. He also learned about food safety, various cooking techniques, and menu planning. The second half of the course is budgeting and finances. He will be using a workbook that teaches checkbook balancing as well as reading Dave Ramsey's book, The Total Money Makeover. If we have time, we will also work on laundry and simple sewing. If that doesn't fit in this year, we'll cover it next year.

When we finish this school year, we will begin looking at the possibility of EM taking community college classes during his junior year. JT completed 26 college credits using that plan and we'd like to see EM do the same.