It’s not been all lapbooks and readalouds in the old home-schoolhouse these last few months. Well, really, it’s never been lapbooks, because although the pictures I’ve seen look cool I’ve never quite understood what they are or why you do them.
In any case, the road to homeschooling high school has been bumpy, and we need to get out of some bad habits now. As of tomorrow, Violet, the 13yo, is cutting back her formal learning activities (classes or curriculum) to just a few: chemistry, an online current events class, and a literature class at co-op. I guess officially we should also count Shakespeare Youth Theater and maybe piano in the “formal” realm. And that’s it for a while.
Victoria, the 9yo, also has the option to cut back, but for now she is really happy with the progress she has been making in math and French and she wants to keep with what we’ve been doing. And history is reading, and who doesn’t love reading?
It should be noted that Violet has big plans for writing, and for reading more and more about linguistics, and doing lots of art, and opening an etsy shop for selling art, and getting her Chinese writing and reading caught up with her conversation skills. I’m forgetting a bunch of other stuff she has written in a notebook. Tomorrow she’ll be catching up on chemistry after a vacation with Mimi and Papa while her dad and I were abroad and after a leisurely Thanksgiving weekend. She’s decided to extend her upcoming current events presentation to include something called Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation. She already had some kind of mind-reading story lined up, so now she’ll have a broader theme of “Ethics of Brain Science,” or something like that. Or that’s the plan for now.
Also, she’d like to do more baking.
It makes me a little nervous, nudging our family further along the “relaxed” spectrum of relaxed homeschoolers. I have many good qualities, I like to think, but “relaxed” is not one of them. But it also makes me nervous to wonder what the consequences of the insane schedule and the frequent arguments over things neither of us really care about might be.
Violet baked two pies this week, and I think the consequences of that were excellent.