Hello Again

I have not been here in a while. In all honesty, I have been on the fence as to whether I should continue with the young man heading into high school. I think I can still share about homeschooling in hopes of encouraging others out there and maybe even help someone find a resource they were needing. But I probably do need to change how much detail I share about the young man, himself. We'll see how that goes.

So we pretty much did follow the plans I had for his year 8. Not surprisingly, math has continued to be a challenge and we've tried different things. But I'll get to that later. I do need to say that we did not start high school yet this year. As we started to look at what his goals are and what it's going to take to aim for those, we decided to take another year before starting high school. So, this has been a level-up year that we've called year 8.5. And since it is already April, I can safely say it has been a good year and he has met the challenge to level-up.

The first thing we did this year was to switch to another co-op so he could take a photography class. In this co-op, he also took General Science and a literature class. In addition to the co-op, he took an English class at our local One Day Academy designed for getting up to high school level writing. Yes, that is four outside classes. At home, we did math, Foundations from Easy Peasy, and history.

Having four outside classes proved rather challenging for both of us. But we learned a lot from each class and they helped us meet our objective to level-up. We learned some things that work for him that I never thought would be a good idea, like IEW style writing instruction. We also learned some things that didn't work so well, like charts and tests for vocabulary study. He has learned how to study more effectively from the General Science class. His favorite class was photography and I believe he will continue that.

For math, we started the year with Math-U-See Epsilon. While we didn't stick with that, it did help us over that wall with fractions. Once we did that, the way he was teaching seemed to confuse him. So I switched over to Easy Peasy's middle school Step 1 math, which primarily uses Khan Academy. We also had a friend from church offer to tutor him. While it's been slow, he has continued to make progress and I believe working through the summer will have him to a point where he'll be able to start algebra in the fall. That's huge y'all!

Our mantra for the next couple of months is, "Finish strong!" I have enjoyed watching him grow in both his academic and athletic abilities. As I am beginning to plan for next year I am excited to see the directions his interests take and watch him continue to grow. High school, here we come!