Happy Easter

So we have reached the end of another week this term. It was a cold & and wet one with Daddy gone to Tanzania & Zambia since Sunday.

For the most part we have moved school into the living room where we can sit under blankets with a heater on when necessary as it was so cold. Not much getting out because of all the rain either.

Misha started Remedial lessons at Tannie Hettie again on Tuesday. She helps him with Afrikaans but we might be able to stop the lessons. We’ll see how this term goes. Maybe we will just let him go once a month or so from next term onwards, depending on how satisfied Tannie Hettie is with his progress.

I am so happy that their Switched on Schoolhouse 3rd Grade Language Arts & 8th Grade General Science II subjects arrived on Tuesday. They both did their sample lessons yesterday & started with their subjects today. I think this might just bring a turning point in their education.

I was not able to sort out the network connectivity so I have to wait for Clive to get home and resolve that, but they took turns doing their work with the full installation on Clive’s laptop and both had very high scores for their first quizzes. Of course, Jesse told me all about Aristotle, Copernicus & Sir Isaac Newton from his Post-Renaissance Science lesson today. His excitement about what he learnt has spilled over in an unprepared oral. I think with this I might be able to get him do those some more of those orals and essays that he hates so much. Every section however, includes an essay-type question and the facility is awesome. It automatically redirects them to MS Word and there I will be able to set up speech-to-text for them to make for hassle-free typing…After just one day with the new curriculum, Jesse’s already saying he could get used to this, however, judging by his placement tests, it seems he’s going to have quite a bit of catching up to do on earth science, chemistry & physics as they hardly touched on that at school.

Misha also seems to like his new Language Arts. He actually finished all his bookwork early today & was done with his SOS by 11am. That was quite a change to the usual 3-4pm finishing times. It seems we may just be revolutionising our home education once we change their core subjects also over to SOS. I’m still waiting for his Teaching Textbooks Maths to arrive & can hardly wait. If it’s anything like SOS I’m sure home education will become quite a bit easier from here on.

Of course I love that most the work is graded automatically, and it leaves me with only paragraphs and essays that need be graded, so I might just be able to fit some more scrap therapy into my schedule in the near future. Seriously, I think I could live with SOS for the rest of our home educational journey.

I also discovered today that I can create custom curriculum. So once I’ve figured out how, I can add quizzes & tests for his Le-Amen Curriculum to his SOS & just maybe will have have him dragging his feet less about having to do them & of course in the process I will reduce my workload marking those all tests because they too, could then be automatically graded… so here’s to my next challenge… learning how to create those custom subjects, tests & quizzes…

Both boys have gone to sleep over with friends today, so for now I am home alone until hubby gets back tomorrow. Then on Saturday we’re off to Vanderbijlpark to visit my sis and Mom who’s currently visiting there after the birth of her little girl last Thursday. I still have loads of marking to do, but for now I’m taking a short break & will get through those books early next week.

Due to the easter weekend and my mom visiting from Ireland I have decided to take make next Tuesday a school holiday & might even decide to still take Thursday & Friday off as well.

In the interim I wish you all a very blessed Easter weekend & for those taking time off next week, enjoy~!