Saturday, May 28, 2011

Hasta La Vista, School Year

I will not miss you. Yet. It was a crazy one. I feel like we had more ups than downs, but we didn't accomplish as much as we needed to. We missed alot during the second half of our year. I did figure a plan for next year, though, while I felt bogged down in the current year. The big girl still has two lessons to finish on her math that will take her all of 10 minutes and the baby has the test pages in her grammar book that we're going to do today. The boy did two tests on Wednesday, so, lucky thing, he's done. The kids get evaluated Tuesday, and I am mailing the papers on Wednesday.

This year we studied the human body. Pretty cool stuff, if I do say so myself. One of the freebies I downloaded to go along with our science book was a cut out of the human body. Each section highlighted a different part of the body. You clip each part together and at the end of the study you have a whole body. Yeah, I didn't do that part. I'm kicking myself now, but I can honestly say I don't think I would have coompleted it. Then I would have kicked myself for not completing it. Not going there. Next year we are going to take a general science approach. Lots of experiments covering different types of science. I have chemistry, biology, earth sciences, weather and meteorology, archaeology, health and nutrition, and physical science. I am looking forward to it. My kids are, too. That's the best part for me.

We missed some opportunities to participate in some activities I think the kids would have enjoyed. There was a great acting class that was relatively inexpensive and very close to home. We left our Tuesday co-op. We had to stop dancing. Field trips! Most of it was because we were moving. Then the move got delayed. And delayed. And it's still delayed. I hated to sign up for anything and then have to leave in the middle of it. That was crazy. So far the only thing that would be delayed would be nap time. No, wait, I don't delay that for anything.

I let myself get in the way much of the time. Depression is my illness. I'm absolutley positive when I say that much of the time I was wallowing on the couch, apathetic about the school work and whether it was getting done, I was in the middle of depression. So much going on personally I let it drag me down. Instead of cowgirl upping and riding, I wallowed around in the woe-is-me. That was my bad.

I always talk to the kids about our school year and what they are interested in. Some of it they don't really have a choice about. We are going to study math and science and history and blah, blah, blah. But at least they have some control over which aspects of those things we are going to study. If they aren't vested, they won't care is how I see it. Give them the opportunity to make decisions and choices and my kids do a bang up job.

We are taking some much needed down time and freeing our minds some. We will do some math over the summer, just to keep skills. But we are going to do fun math. I have a fun book of different types of math puzzles that the kids will work through. We will read our summer away. Hopefully we will settle somewhere, whether it be here or there. As long as we settle.  

Have a great day.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thought you had to go to the end of June?

Cristy said...

Just couldn't do it. The kids wanted to get it done, so they did. We're all glad about that.

Anonymous said...

Glad you got it done!! I sure wouldn't want to go to school until the end of June.