Trinity Academy opened today. We started the day before the school district, apparently. But, then, we take Fridays mostly off, so we end up with the same number of days this week. When we signed Amira up for her ballet class, I grabbed the calendar for the year, since the studio is closed in accord with the school district closures, and I had no idea what most of those dates were.

I am feeling a little more comfortable with teaching the children this year, and have a better feel on how to teach my two groups. Alexander and Dominic are pretty much doing the same work, with the exception of math and their recitations. Dominic keeps up very well in all the other areas, so even though he's third grade, he's really doing fourth grade stuff except for the math and recitation.

Amira is so gung ho for kindergarten, so I started her this year. I had been doing a hybrid of pre-school and kindergarten activities with her and Elijah last year, and this year I have both in kindergarten. Elijah is much more ready for the work now. It was great to see him getting more and more interested in what we were doing last year, and it's much easier to teach him this year. I was so concerned about pushing him and making him hate learning. All of our other children can be pushed a little bit and take it and rise to the challenge, but he is a bit stubborn (Rich and I have no idea where he gets that), as well as having the social and emotional development issues, and it wasn't worth it to me to fight him and make him hate school/reading/math. On top of that, I knew it would be fruitless. Trying to get him to do things he isn't ready for causes frustration for both of us, and doesn't actually get the task done. I was a bit concerned that he would feel bad that his two year younger than him sister was ready and getting it sooner than he was, but it doesn't bother him in the least, and actually provides some friendly competition for him, as he tries to answer before her, get the right answer and all that.

I also have kind of found a rhythm and system for handling their different studies. Since the first part of our science and history is reading about it, I have all the children sit with me and I read it aloud from the book while the older children read along and the younger ones look at the pictures. We keep our giant dictionary nearby and look up words they don't know, so I can teach them how to use the dictionary properly at the same time. The projects, experiments and writing, I do mostly with Alexander and Dominic.

We do art appreciation together, since my goal is to expose them to different artists and styles of art. I'm looking for music instruction for at least Dominic, as he asked me if he could learn to play the violin. We now have enough children to have a string quintet and piano accompaniment. Yasmina's fingers are so long, so she will play the piano. Unfortunately, although everyone seemed to be on board with this plan, Alexander was going to play cello, Jerome was going to play bass, Elijah would play viola and Amira on violin as well, it seems that this is no longer the case. Amira announced that she wanted to play the tuba.

Religious instruction is with the whole family, too. We've changed our schedule a little, so Rich can lead and participate in Morning Prayer with us before breakfast. After breakfast, when Rich has left for work, we sit at the coffee table to do religious study, our reading in history, science and art appreciation. Then I split up our classes. Big art projects, science experiments or history projects are done on Saturdays.

If you are interested in our weekly schedule and how I handle the two classes, please let me know and I'll post our rough schedule. I am so thrilled not to be chained to the school holiday schedule. I know I've posted about it before, but we are able to do our homeschooling mostly with the seasons of the church, so we take a little break at Advent to focus on religious education, start again after the New Year (Holy Name), and continue until Holy Week, then we take that week as well as Bright Week off. Except for Thanksgiving weekend and Veteran's Day, we don't take the other holidays or breaks off, which means we can take the longer breaks when we want to do so.

Yasmina did well today, as she could just nurse while I read out loud, or asked questions or looked over work. We were still finished by 1:30, including a lengthy break and lunch. Everyone was happy to be back to our normal school schedule.

Labels: Family, Homeschooling