Wednesday, June 5, 2013

Where has the time gone? A year and a half has passed and it passed swiftly. My children are ages 18, 10 and 7 now. My eighteen year old is graduating highschool this week and will be moving to our home state of California. I cant believe I wont have her here with me. I am very sad but also very proud of her independence and drive to begin somewhere else. The military base we live near and really the entire city is not the best area. I definitely do not want my daughters to stay here. I hate to be so honest but I would be lying if I said something different. As a matter of fact our city was voted in the top 20 worst places to live! Yes, we have a high crime rate and the majority of people here say they do not feel safe. So for my daughter to get out of this place is perfectly fine with me. 
My 10 year old has grown so much this last year, literally. She is as tall as me now, I am only 5"2 so it didn't take her long. She has finally caught up to her grade level in our homeschool and to that we yell, Hallelujah!! We are so excited and I feel so happy. I had stopped the presses even if that meant she was behind a while but she caught up and testing this year showed her at/and above grade level. There was a lot of tears from both of us and a lot of feeling defeated. But she came out on top and she stuck with it! My heart smiled to see the look on her face when she got her end of year test scores. I normally don't put a lot of stock in testing but because she did I decided to make a bigger deal of it this year.
My 7 year old has done great. I took her out of private school and decided to keep her home and we have gone through a few curriculum changes but as of now we are happy about where she is at. We started her out using Saxon phonics and Saxon math for first grade. But it became long and boring. So I bought myself a set of Rays Arithmetic books and we have been happily using them since. I also took out Shurley Grammar and had her start on Phonics Pathways and McGuffeys Readers. I love them! But most importantly she does too.
The past year we had come back to a style of homeschooling I pushed to the side in the beginning. I decided to dive into a Charlotte Mason, living books curriculum. We left Classical Conversations because I felt it was going too fast for my children and just wanted enjoy some of the things we were learning instead of rushing through to the next weeks memory work. I pushed CM aside originally because I had not read her works and thought it was too simple and too slow. I was completely wrong and I fell in love with this style of teaching and learning. Most people know of Charlotte Mason but if you don't here is a link http://bushnell.net/~peanuts/faq1.html
This should give you a good overview of who she was. I may go into more about her next post but right now I just wanted to give a little homeschool update.
Hopefully from now on I will remember this little blog of mine and write.