Progress Report

More than a week into our school year now (more than three weeks for Noah). If I were having a parent-teacher conference with myself, I'd be pretty happy and a wee bit boastful in both roles, lol. Just to touch on some highlights...

HISTORY. As I mentioned, we're working on tackling both ancient and medieval history this year. We're starting with ancient times for the first couple sessions. In our initial attempt to figure out what we're doing, we came up with this:

(Tangent: Yay for finally using this giant pad of paper that I've had since the boys were learning to read! lol)

So. This is a really rough start. We found three or four books with timelines and consolidated what we felt were important events. Then we added in some very preliminary details, still using our timelines in the books. We're going to go through and just research different points on our timeline and add details as they interest us. It's rather liberating not having a set plan or going in chronological order. :) We'll see where this goes...I'm pretty excited...

WRITING. Last week, we had a fantastic time doing a free-writing exercise. I won't retype it all here, though I'm guessing you'd enjoy it!, but the boys and I took turns writing three stories (all starting with the same sentence "Bob was bored") and then rotating the notebooks every five minutes to continue the story. It was entertaining. ;) 

This week (so far), we're starting on our report project for this session but also did a quick six word memoir exercise from one of the books I'm working from. I had each boy come up with three. Here are Micah's:

• I was born. I grew up.
• Archery & karate are part of me. (Yes, this is seven words. Micah claims that the ampersand doesn't count and that he should get credit for thinking outside the box. Yes, he really said that. LOL)
• Wake up. Eat. Play. Sleep. Repeat.

And here are Asher's:

• Karate. Gymnastics. Eat. Sleep. Rinse. Repeat.
• I wish I was Iron Man.
• I'm a black belt very soon.

CEC. Noah's classes are going well. No complaints, really. He's doing a good job of being responsible for his own work and time and has already had to handle a few hiccups (technological for the most part) that required sorting things out with his advisor. All good.

And, for those of you not on Facebook, CEC was recently named the top high school in Colorado by Newsweek. To celebrate, CEC had a party last weekend with free food and raffles for iPad minis and cake. :)

And that's some of what's been going on here...