A Great Day in the Life of a Homeschooler

Today DS said the words that every homeschooling mom hopes to hear, “I love homeschooling”. Today was a great homeschooling day with DS. He did his work and then we made dinner together and a batch of zucchini bread. I figure that I will count the time as Home Economics. We found a delicious recipe on Allrecipes.com . It took a very long time to cook, but was very yummy. DS also decorated some scripture signs for me for a program this weekend and practiced a recitation on the history of the Pledge of Allegiance for his volunteer service as a Den Chief (Did you know that the original pledge was not specifically for the United States and did not contain the words “under God”? “Under God” was actually added by President Eisenhower and objected to by the daughter of the author, Francis Bellamy.) Also, after trying to do his geography work. I have realized that there are times that a 43% is still an excellent score. I have been working with the Sheppard Software site to familiarize DS with the countries of the world. He has already satisfied the US states and capitals and so we’ve moved on to Africa. He is working on Level 4, which has him click on the correct country on a bare outline map of Africa. Now I realize that 43% doesn’t sound that good (he actually got a 63% today so we are improving), but you have to click inside boarders of the countries that you cannot see. I might add that some of those African countries are very, very small. So when I watched him today, I realized that DS may be getting marked as wrong, but most of his clicks were within millimeters of the correct location. I had to take my hats off to him. Africa is tough.

Even DD survived her self-test in Math with limited tears and frankly, she did very well. She just needs to relax and think in small steps. On the positive side, she is becoming much more systematic in her math work. I can ask her to read her second or fourth line and she can find it and read what she has. If there is an error, she can even back up through her work to double check her work. This alone has been quite a triumph and will help her tremendously as she continues in her work.

So all and all, today was a great homeschool day.