Winding down the homeschool...

Those of you who have made the mistake of bringing up homeschooling in my presence have probably heard this already (I do tend to go on when given the opportunity, don't I?), but we homeschool year round.

It has it's benefits. First of all, it keeps the kids occupied. It only takes us 2-3 hours a day, so it's not like they ever really NEED a break like public school kids do, so it's not like we take uberlong vacations ever. But, going year-round also means that when we do want to take a vacation, we can do it when everyone else is in school. This translates to 5 minute or less wait-times on rides at Disneyland and no problem finding a camp site. (Though it has been a long time since we've been camping, come to think of it.) It also means that when we get to the end of a text and go to start the next, we can skip the first 1/3rd of the lessons, because they are generally all review designed to get the class back up to speed on all that they've forgotten over the long summer break. This means that instead of taking us 9 months to do a grade level, it takes us roughly 6. This is why my 6 year old is doing 2nd grade math and reading. It's not that I'm a super-fab teacher, it just doesn't take us as long to cover the material.

Anyway, we've been cruising right along in this way for the last 2 years. But as we get closer to the move, we also just so happen to be coming to the end of some of our texts. And if I move into the next text, well, then that means that we'll skip all that review and then have a big interuption when we do the actual move, and then when we get back into things, we'll be trying to start it up again without any review built in to the program to get us back on track.

So, the kids are on the cusp of their first real, long vacation. We're starting to taper off our subjects as we get to a good stopping point. Today, for instance, we reached the end of our social studies book, so we're going to stop studying that formally until we start up again in May or so. With the other subjects we've stopped in the last few weeks, it means we're down to Math, Phonics, Religion, and Reading. We'll finish our Phonics book by the end of February, but everything else will carry through until the move. Of course, the good thing about homeschooling is that we're more aware of lesson opportunities as they arise, so I'm sure we'll get plenty of science, social studies, music, etc in while we're in school limbo.

The one thing I'm most concerned about is our math. There simply isn't a good stopping point for either of the girls before the move. We will have at least a 6-week break while we go through the last push of packing, a month of visits and transition, and a week of unpacking on the other end, and I'm worried about how well the kids will remember their math during that time. The youngest is only going to be about 40 lessons in on her Kindergarten math, but K will be closer to 100 lessons in by the time we move, which is a harder time to break, I think. I'm toying with the idea of just taking their math books with us back to MA for our 3-week visit, but I don't know how that would go. Of course, April weather can do either way. We may be trapped inside with nothing to do while everyone is at work, so it might be a good idea.

In the meantime, less time doing school translates into more time to pack, so that is not a bad thing at all.