2014 subject review

Okay, we're done. I was shooting for 200 days but we hit the 180 so I'm calling it for the year. We need a break and to focus on the holidays.

2014 was a healthy mix of good, bad, and indifferent but overall, it was a substantial improvement over 2013. Of course, anything was an improvement over 2013 homeschooling, so the bar was not set particularly high. But I feel like we cleared it with plenty of room to spare. I maintained notebooks of work for Sunny and Posy for the first time - year 3 and year 1 - with grammar worksheets, spelling lists, handwriting practice, checklists for their online math program, field trip reports, and whatever else we felt like putting in them.

I did a "here's our plan" post in January ... well, what we did was:

1. Opening: We weren't entirely consistent with it - sometimes, we'd just jump into some kind of project or assignment. The girls did learn the Pledge of Allegiance, which hand is their right, and Sunny and Posy memorized some verses of scripture.

2. Language: Sunny and Posy got through 1st grade grammar from a free program I found online, and just when they finished that level, it disappeared. Darn it! I'm working on building 2nd and 3rd grade from some other resources. They did 20 spelling lists over the course of the year - I'd like to increase that number but it was a good amount for the first year of working on them. The handwriting skills for all of them, all the way down to Magnolia, improved quite a bit. It's still really sloppy and all over the paper, but at least now I can read it.

3. Reading: We read and read and read and read at our house. You would be very hard pressed to come to our house and NOT find at least one person with their nose in a book, including at mealtimes. This has never been an issue. I've started "quizzing" Sunny and Posy about some of their books - they can spit back plot points, characters, and setting like nobody's business. I'm currently looking for some kind of outline for me to follow in checking for their comprehension level. And I'd love to find out where they score in testing - how far ahead they are. Heh heh. Birdie learned to read on her own this fall and is doing spectacular.

4. History: We didn't do much with this - we started Story of the World Book 1 (Ancient times) but it doesn't really hold our attention. My next plan is to actually keep going with it because I think it's a good spine for a more substantial history program, but whip through Book 1 really fast until we get to the more interesting stuff.

5. Science: We had our garden outside, tried some planting experiments inside, and read books about seeds and dirt. The girls also like to do random chemistry-type experiments with their dad on Saturday mornings - it's kind of comical. Sunny had a chemistry class at our fall co-op session, and Posy had an earth science class at the same session. We don't do a ton of science, which is my bad because it's their favorite thing. Need to up the science quantity next year.

6. Art: I found the Getting to Know the World's Greatest Composers book series by Mike Venezia at our library, and we read some of the books and listened to classical music while doing other work. The girls' favorite, hands down, is Peter Tchaikovsky. They love the Nutcracker and we watched a full production of Swan Lake on YouTube. They also like Muppets' versions of classical music - Beaker singing Ode to Joy, for instance. I wanted to do more projects like experimenting with art mediums but it didn't happen that often. They did, however, go through more markers than I can count and an awful lot of scratch paper drawing picture after picture. Sunny started learning to sew and I'm excited for us to work more in this particular line of creativity.

7. Math: Oh math. Our nemesis. It doesn't help that I hate math already and don't have the first clue how to teach it and as hard as I've tried to encourage numbers, my own sad attitude has apparently morphed over to my children. So sorry, girls. We're still muddling along at the 1st and 2nd grade levels. Sigh.

8. Co-ops: Two in the spring, one in the fall. We're finding our niche in Manchester, which makes me happy not the least reason because it's close to our house. We're not going halfway across the state to find our community. The classes were a good mix of fun with friends and academics, and hanging out at a children's museum all day is not a bad gig for our preschoolers.

9. Extra curriculars: Sunny played a season of soccer in the spring and wow, that bombed. I'm sketchy about signing up any of our kids for soccer again but maybe we'll try again in a couple of years with Birdie. Sunny, Posy, and Birdie all started ballet classes in September at a little studio about a mile from our house. They love it and are so excited for the spring recital.

10. Field trips: the UConn Museum of Natural History, the Piano Guys concert, children's museums in Richmond VA and Washington DC, Eric Carle Museum book festival, Roger Williams zoo in Providence, Peter Pan ballet at the Hartt School of Music in West Hartford, Nauvoo IL, Kirtland OH, Palmyra NY (lots of living history on our family vacation), Peabody Natural History Museum at Yale, Springfield Museums and the Dr. Seuss Memorial, New England Air Museum, Hammonasset beach, and the Mystic Aquarium. A good list! I'm shooting for more next year.