Time grew wings

I'm not totally sure how it happened that an entire week has passed since I last posted. I am, after all, supposed to be doing this to keep record of our family life and homeschooling year; it may be strange to look back on the year's posts when April rolls around and think, "I wonder what happened in that isolated week?"

Were we felled by the flu? Did an ice storm hit our city and deprive us of power?

No, neither of those things. Actually, we've just been working away at school. It suddenly hit me that we are now in the second semester and that we're not halfway through our grammar book. Also, we're only on Lesson 5 in our Composition class, which is not good. The reason why this happened is because I originally devised a dumb plan in which we'd do one subject three times a week and the other subject twice a week, alternating subjects weekly.

This is our sixth year of homeschooling and you'd think I'd know that we were going to fall behind. YOU'D THINK I'D KNOW. All I can say in my defense is that it seemed like a whole lot of language arts at the time, back there in August by the side of the pool. But now, faced with the reality of not completing either book by the end of May...well, that simply can't happen. We pay a lot of money for these books and we finish every last one of them, no matter what. Even if we're gathered at the side of that very same swimming pool come June, Meelyn and Aisling writing compositions with spiral-bound notebooks balanced on their knees.

So. I have upped our grammar intake to four pages, four times a week. Four times a week of nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives...It isn't hard at all, but the girls complain of the dreadful boredom of it. We also are going to need to do one lesson in the composition book per week, maybe even two.

Thankfully, they're both well along in their math books and should be done with those by late April. Vocabulary is moving along, exactly on schedule. Meelyn is finished with her reading comprehension and thinking skills workbooks for the year; Aisling coming along with her thinking skills and reading comprehension books and should finish them by late May.

I designed our social studies/geography/history course myself and we're working through two books published by Carson-Dellarosa. They're actually a bit easy for the girls, but they're so well done (for the most part) and informative that I decided to use them anyway. These two books, one of which is titled United States Geography and the other titled United States Government and Presidents, have reproduceable pages that we copy off every day. The girls are almost finished with the Southeast region (they've completed the New England and Mid-Atlantic regions) in the first book and we just finished studying the Declaration of Independence in the second; I printed off the text version of the Declaration from an online source. We read it together last week and Meelyn and Aisling were incensed by the many offenses of King George III. I had to gently remind them that the problem of King George had already been addressed.

They're also heavily involved in studying about Ancient Greece for HISTO Round 4, coming up next week.

As for literature, they've both finished The Adventures of Tom Sawyer for ARCHES and are poised to begin Carry On, Mr. Bowditch in March's meeting. And, of course, they frequently have their noses buried in library books.

Oh, and typing. Meelyn and Aisling need to get started back with that. They had the whole first semester off, but now it's time to get crack-a-lackin'. They'll be so pleased. Second semester is frequently brutal this way.

Oh, I'll be so glad when January is over. It's been so cold and gray and dull every since the Christmas holidays wrapped up. Schoolwork seems as endless as a song by Celine Dion when we're in the presence of January.