Smrt Lernins

Today, Captain Science (who has been doing a splendid job of staying on track these last three days) encountered a bit of a road block while working on Writing Strands. The lesson asked him to write about the parts of his schooling that his parents might find interesting. That would be all well and good, but the activity went on to request information about some fairly out-of-home schooling educational experiences, like science projects with classmates, boring lectures from teachers, and the like.

Now, color me confused, but this is the writing curriculum praised by many homeschoolers, including the authors of The Well Trained Mind, so I didn’t expect that an entire lesson (prewriting, two writing assignments) would be relating to the public (or at least more formally structured, with other students) school experience. I told Captain Science to just write about his homeschool day as though he were relating it to Officer Daddyman, but he keeps coming upstairs to ask me things like, “Mama, we don’t have periods. What do I do?” (“Just write about your different subjects.”)

Of course, as much as Captain Science has enjoyed Writing Strands, and as much as I like how it is structured, we’ve had the issue of it just plain being below his abilities level. I’m having to combine multiple days worth of lessons into a single day, just to give him an appropriate level of work. I think now I should have started him with Writing Strands 4, but the recommended age range threw me. Ha! Should have known better.

If I’m going to have to rewrite and reorganize most or all of the lessons, I may as well just write the lessons. Luckily, our Michael Clay Thompson Town curriculum came in the mail yesterday, complete w/ the writing program, Paragraph Town, so hopefully we’ll be able to move forward with something a little more challenging (for him, as the challenge of Writing Strands was mainly for me).

I can’t wait to dive into our MCT stuff, but I’m making myself take the weekend to plan our course.