Yes, we are now in the final days of our homeschool. On about May 14th we will have officially hit 180 days. We will do more than that because we won’t be completely done and we will continue to do some things over the summer break.

As I thought of a title for today the following song popped in…so…you’re welcome.

Now that you’ve been entertained, let’s get to it

This week (and it’s only Wednesday!) was pretty rough. We started the week with torrential rains and massive wind. This led to yet another power outage (we were out for several days during a pretty nasty snowstorm last month). Nothing like starting the day with scrambling to save your food in your refrigerator so you don’t have to throw away hundreds of dollars of food…again. Thankfully this power outage only last 5 hours instead of 4 days. That same night, driving my son to his scout group, my car flashed a message at me that I’ve never seen, nor knew what it meant. Needless to say, he didn’t make it to his meeting because I opted to turn around and call my dad for help. How blessed am I to still have him in my life. More blessing can be found in the encouragement and advice from my friends. Come Tuesday when I decided to get in the car and drive it before calling the garage, the message was gone, but being the pessimist I am, I am sure this won’t be the end of that story.

Though things happened, we never missed a beat and went right on with our studies. Days like that are not the most ideal school days, but we do the best we can. Back in October through Christmas Eve, I was going back and forth to the dentist and endodontist appointments to rid myself of nerve pain in a tooth without any signs of infection or damage. The endodontist, boggled, quite frankly, used every method possible to figure out what was going on with that tooth before killing it. Seven appointments later I was pain-free and tooth was “restored”. Not an experience I ever want to go through again. It was not a painless procedure. Apparently this happens very rarely, butbeen a lot further behind they could not get my tooth numb. You can imagine my agony during drilling out my nerve.

My children did so well during that time period and stayed home and did their work without me, even when my appointments took hours. If my children were younger, I’m not quite sure how I would have done it. We had  been, months prior, trying to get them used to being home by themselves for brief periods of time, teaching them to be responsible and comfortable alone. These kinds of things come up and when you’re homeschooling and you just find a way to get everything done. On days where we did field trips, we would start our day earlier and get, at the very least, our core subjects done, so not to get too far behind. One downside of the Lifepac workbooks is that there is so much material that you really need everyday of the school year to get through them all. That is something that isn’t a problem with the Christian Light science course because it allows for field trip days.

Let me explain a little about what I mean. Both my children used Alpha Omega Press Lifepac worktexts this year in Math, History and Language Arts. Every day, every week of the school year, I have written down goals on note cards for my children with the number of pages they needed to get done so that we can get through all 10 books by the end of the 180 days. Here we are with less than 20 days left and I can tell you where we are at. We are not going to finish all 10 worktexts in either the 5th grade math or the pre-algebra, with my son (pre-algebra) being a lot farther behind. There is ALOT of material to cover and even having them do 4-5 (or even more some days) pages a day and 50 minutes per math “class” (which I bumped to 60 min. mid-year) we are grossly behind. I honestly do not know how they expect you to get through all that in 180 days. I followed all their teacher guides and recommendations on how to set up the school days. They only suggest doing 3-4 pages (some days more) for 45 min each day. That would never have worked.

We are also behind slightly in History and Language Arts but I think we will finish, even if we go just beyond 180 days, which we were already planning on anyway. We will at least get up the 10th book and, whereas in math, we will not. We will attempt to finish the worktexts through the summer. It will be good to keep it fresh and have them ready for the next school year. Next year we are not planning to use Lifepac for Math courses. We are currently still in process of choosing, but leaning towards Masterbooks. There are things that I really liked in the language arts courses and my son wants to stick to the Lifepac where my daughter does not. I am still deciding on what to use for next year. Lifepac worktexts can surely be good for more individual study at the levels my children are in but I am a pretty involved “teacher” so they aren’t on their own. That said, I don’t really want an English course where I have to actually teach because I like amount of reading they need to do and I already do the teaching for Bible, Art, Music, Health and I did for PA History this year also. We are going to stick the Lifepac History courses because we thought they were great with the information provided.

We opted to mostly complete the Veritas Press History of Art course, with less than half the book to finish next year, because we wanted to also work on some other areas of art. We will complete our science course, even with projects, field trips and experiments. My son enjoyed the course, but my daughter has not. Since I intended for them to learn science together, I needed something engaging and challenging enough for my 7th grader but not too hard for my 5th grader.  I opted for the Christian Light, workbook based, grade 6 science. That year’s course materials cover many aspects of science, so I am calling it a general science course. Next year we’ve decided to go with a Masterbooks science curriculum (reprinting of Answers in Genesis course) which hopefully becomes available soon.

In my next post I will try to explain more about our homeschool day and how I am keeping track of everything and maybe more reviews of the materials we used. You can visit my resources page for information on the PA laws as well as help and curriculum choices. I will be adding to this list as time allows. I want to add the helpful resources I’ve found that we used for different subject areas. I will share with you that you can find a lot on YouTube.

If you’re new to homeschooling, CONGRATS! You’ve made a huge step and a wonderful choice and investment for your children’s future. Don’t be overwhelmed, I know it’s easy to become so. You can do this moms and dads!