Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Getting Back into the Swing of Things

I finally feel that we are getting back into the swing of things.  October was taken over by packing.  November was eaten away by unpacking, retreat, and Thanksgiving.  December came along and the holidays filled our time.  It's midway through January, and we are finally back to do full days of school with nearly every subject being covered.  But, there are still some kinks to work out.

On the top of the list of things to do is getting caught up with record keeping.  I have a huge pile of papers that haven't been entered into Homeschool Tracker or filed.  I'd like to get my record keeping up to date so that I can see where we are and figure out how the rest of the year will go.  Right now, I'm just doing the next thing without regard to how much time we have left in the school year.  Will we finish some subjects before June?  Others may take us through the beginning of next school year or beyond if I don't plan it right; we are that behind.  So I really want to get this done...sooner rather than later.

In addition to that, I have about three weeks of school work that I haven't even looked at.  For the most part this is okay; however, for math, it is not.  I made that mistake during our move, and Sam got mixed up on a couple of problem types.  He proceeded to do every problem of those two types wrong.  Practicing the wrong way to do something is not a good way to learn it.  So, we had to go back through two months of work and redo a much of stuff.  It took us a week to review.  I don't want that to happen again.

Finally, I would like to get my bearings for the rest of the school year.  How many chapters/lessons/pages do we have left, and how will we cover them before June?  What library books does our new library have for our history studies, and which do I want to put on hold (we're currently doing history without any additional reading to go with it)?  Are there any skipped art projects we want to do or should we just pick up where we are?  How are we going to manage to finish up chemistry so we still have time to get to the physics that Sam wants to study?  And then there's spelling.  Sam really needs spelling but what we were doing really isn't working all that well.  I need to get on the ball with spelling.

Of course, we can't forget the littles.  I need to figure out how to keep them busy without the TV or computer.  This year has seen way too much TV watching on their part and too little of everything else.

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1 Comments:

Matt said...

Hi Joanne--

If you're curious about an alternative to Homeschool Tracker, you might check out Homeschool Day Book:

http://www.homeschooldaybook.com/

It's a different kind of homeschool record keeping. Very lightweight, a lot fewer features. But if simple recordkeeping meets your needs, it might get you through your backlog quicker. :)

And, if it tempts you to try it out, I'll mention that we're running a promotion where you can get a free permanent license if you do a blog review . . .

Happy homeschooling--
Matt