New Year, New Challenges

I know I’ve been lagging behind on my blog updates lately. Although we’ve scaled down on our field trips last year, we’ve still had quite a few as well as some other activities & I’ve lacked the energy to stay up late for blog entries.

This year we’ll focus a bit more on fitness & schoolwork. Jesse has taken it on himself to become our personal trainer & sees to it that we do exercise daily on top of going to gym twice a week. He is scheduled to finish 10th grade at the end of Jan after starting it on the 1st of May last year. He will also be doing his SAT exams during the course of this year. Of course he’s also counting the days until he can go for his learner’s licence in June. I’ll be rather happy to have my own private chauveur once the nervousness of teaching him to drive has subsided.

Clive insisted that Misha gets back to doing formal curricula this year, so he’s been doing placement tests the last 2 weeks in order for me to ascertain which grade curriculum I need to get him. He chose to learn Afrikaans this year too, so there’s another challenge. This time we’ll focus on learning to speak & understand the language rather than working through workbooks that merely produce rote memorisation. At least he has had a nice long break from “schoolwork” & is now more motivated to start learning again. I’m hoping that the Switched on Schoolhouse material will work as well with him as it does for Jesse, but I know I’ll need to find alternative resources in some areas to cater for his learning style to help him retain the material.

Last week marked the first of Honey Badgers for this year. Misha still enjoys these monthly zoo outings & we’ll keep them up until he gets tired of them. He seems to have lost interest in the drum lessons but we need to find him some alternative Robotics classes since the JEFA team will now be focusing on the schools & no longer offer the weekly lessons for homeschoolers, much to his disappointment.

Home is rather quiet this week without my big terrorist who’s visiting my sister for the week in order to go to work with Deon. From the sounds of it he enjoyed his first day & could see himself doing that job one day. Let’s see what he says after a whole week missing home & the WiFi.