Smrt Lernins

Hi there! Been a while, hasn’t it.

It’s been a hell of a summer. Sprained ankles and weddings in the US Virgin Islands and cracked teeth (well, only one a piece of the first two, and two of the third one — one for me and one for Patchfire). We’ve been busy.

Today we start our ‘11-’12 school year. I can’t even wrap my head around how weird that is. I mean, I graduated from high school in 1997 and now my older son is starting 6th grade and my younger son is starting Kindergarten. How did I get old so fast?

I think our schedule this year is going to be pretty decent. Captain Science sat down with it and wrote out some ways he could keep himself on track, as well as (on his own) some things he thought made it a good schedule. High point point is apparently well-timed snack and lunch placement. He wants to set a timer for himself so he’ll have a bell to signal class change.

We’re moving our schedule up an hour this year, starting at 8 instead of 9. We all need to start getting up and at ‘em a little earlier anyway, so this will force my hand. I need to start going to bed earlier and waking up earlier to make the most of my day. Or something. Hell, I don’t know.

Tank is ready to go w/ school work. He won’t start most of his stuff until next week, because Daddyman is teaching the game camp, but he can’t wait to get started.

Pissed off today because I will no longer be teaching at the local homeschool co-op. The woman who runs it decided to wait until today to inform me that there will no longer be internet access, and did I need that for my classes? You know, my classes on blogging and online safety? Could I just use “snapshots” of the internet? Could I provide my own internet? Um, no. She’s had my course descriptions since the spring and only just bothered to talk about this with me, for classes starting in two weeks? Thanks, but no thanks, lady. We out.

This week is a light week. Today was orientation and the start of 10am piano lessons (a vast improvement over the 2pm ones, btw) and game camp homework and reading. The next three days are game design camp. Friday is an overview of the curricula for the year, then academic schtuffs start on Monday.

As an aside, Babypie is no longer Babypie. She is now The Honeybadger, because you know what? Honeybadger don’t care. Honeybadger don’t give a shit. She takes what she wants.

I’m so tired. Can’t I just go back to bed and claim I’m unschooling?

It’s almost December and that means it’s time to start obsessively thinking about next school year’s curricula. Captain Science starts “middle school” next year (6th grade) and I really want to up the intensity and quality of some of his subject areas. We’re perfectly fine with continuing with what we’re already doing in some subjects, but in other areas, he definitely needs more/better/morebetter than he’s currently getting. This post is mainly me thinking out-loud (or thinking out-type) about what we might do.

PLATO Science has been passable, but it’s not rigorous enough for middle school and beyond. I’m strongly considering the Duke TIP Independent Learning class Foundations of Modern Biology: Genetics, Evolution, and Ethics for Captain Science’s science next year. It’s geared for grades 7-10, so it shouldn’t be too difficult for him by next school year. I think it will give him a tremendous foundation for understanding evolutionary science from multiple angles/perspectives. I love that it presents evolutionary science within a sociocultural context (TIP lists it as both a science and a social studies) and that it includes a literary element, through The Time Machine. I don’t totally love that the course is $55, the text book is $26, and the reader is $62, but that’s probably a small price to pay for a thorough introduction to biology. I’d probably pick up What Darwin Saw: The Journey That Changed the World as a read-aloud to include Tank (and Babypie, if she’s interested) and Charles and Emma: The Darwins’ Leap of Faith for Captain Science. I was going to save this one until we got to that period of history, but I think the added contextual benefit of including this w/ his biology course makes it a well-timed choice.

I’m quite happy continuing with the Michael Clay Thompson language arts courses, but I’d like to integrate some literary criticism, some comparative literary analysis, and so forth. I think I’ll have to home-brew that one, just like I’ve done with history so far. I have an ever-growing list of things he needs to read. I’d also like to incorporate more creative writing into his language arts.

History…I have no idea! I really want something more thorough than we’re doing now. The History: The Definitive Visual Guide has been a nice spine, but we need something more thorough as we move forward in history. We’ll be covering the 1600s and onward, and I’d like our first pass of US history to be a strong one, providing a sound foundation for his later AP US History coursework. I think the only way to do that is through a lot, a lot, a lot of primary sources and well-written secondary sources. I have a feeling we’ll be relying on a “spine” text less and less as we move forward.

We love Life of Fred and I imagine we’ll continue with Life of Fred: Advanced Algrebra and Fred’s Home Companion: Advanced Algrebra. I do think that this Math and the Cosmos unit looks really neat, however. It might overlap nicely w/ the algebra skills he’s learning or give us something to work on as he wraps up Advanced Algebra.
Again, I think TIP does a great job of integrating multiple disciplines into one course.

Foreign language — definitely starting by next school year. Patchfire pointed me in the direction of Instant Immersion. At $50, compared to Rosetta Stone’s $200ish, I think it’ll be doable to have Captain Science take the Japanese course and for us to be able to afford a tutor at least once a week. I might see if there’s anyway we could go through my former high school’s Japanese language program for a teen tutor. Alternately, I’ll see who I can find either at the local university or through our network of Japanese speaking locals.

I’d love for Captain Science to be able to afford to take the online critical thinking course offered through Online G3, but I think that w/ the other stuff I want us to buy, the cost is prohibitive, especially since this is one elective of many we’d like to do. I will probably snag him the Critical Thinking textbook and develop a lesson plan for it.

I think we’ll continue with computer programming, but I don’t know where we’ll go once we’ve wrapped up KidCoder. Maybe check out the TeenCoder series? Maybe he’ll be ready for something much more robust by then.

It’s hard to project exactly what we’ll be ready to work on by then. As for Tank, he’ll have to have his own post, outlining K-garten plans, though I can’t really do those until I know where he’ll be in terms of reading and math readiness. Yikes. So much uncertainty, but so many fun options!