It's A New Year!!! Grade 7

 I had thought we'd be diligent with school work during the Summer but.... that didn't happen.  Instead we just had fun; and that's OK.  At one point there was a natural lead into some review and I was so happily surprised that he recalled everything I asked him about.  After the end of the year, with it's nose dive into frustration and what felt like several steps in reverse, things were actually learnt and retained.  It was a really good day and I felt encouraged going into this year.  I'll probably have to hold onto that feeling in the coming months.

And now with September we're slowly sliding back into the rhythm of organised learning; very slowly.  It's not being met with joy or excitement though and I have already had the 'talk' with him about attitude and not expressing the whole pre-teen angst and sighing, eye rolling, basically the 'my world is so hard' routine that comes with asking him for something that isn't 'fun'.  But it hasn't been all bad, he was eager (despite how the picture looks, he wasn't actually in the fetal position) to do the Math Train and earn a few candies along the way.  He did really great.  54 questions, only a couple wrong after a long Summer with no other review.  I was very pleased and so was he.

 Because the public schools are all on strike right now my daughter is home too and I've taken on home schooling her for the mean time.  I used this opportunity to do review with Mckenzie by having him teach her the Continents, hemispheres, equator, Prime Meridian, Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn as well as several Oceans and Seas.  Once again he proved that he retained all the info really well.

 With eagerness we hit the library and picked out several books and a couple of DVD's, mainly on Roman and Greek mythology as we'll be studying ancient civilisations and he's chosen these to focus on; no surprise there with his love of Rick Riordan books.  We may have bitten off WAY more than we can chew.

 Rather than throwing him right into the world of writing, which is a struggle I thought we'd do some workbook English.  Last year we focused mainly on writing and it was painful for both of us.  This year I'll try to be more balanced with that.

 Today we did math from a workbook which although seemed more simplistic to me than yesterdays math, it was a slow go.  We played a game of dice and he kept score.  He did plenty of reading and we finished up with some art.  We each used water colours in any patterns or colours we wanted to completely cover a sheet of paper.  When they had dried I cut them into triangles and tomorrow we'll place them on canvas as a large collage of our art.  I can't wait to see how it turns out.