We went and got a bunch of good, good stuff from the district's homeschool resource center today. I felt like a highway bandit, walking out with 18 items I'll be able to keep for a full year. Some of it I'm celebrating not needing to buy myself or use my district curriculum allowance on, and some of it I'm not sure we'll use, but I have the summer to look through everything and try things out.
Teaching Textbooks looks like a clear winner for our family. It's a complete CD-ROM-based math curriculum with some impressive features. She did the first lesson this afternoon and the second one right before dinner when I told my husband I wanted to show him her new math curriculum and she insisted on showing him herself. I actually think she likes it. Like, like likes it. In about 50 lessons she's going to hit multiplication so it's by no means a sure deal, but I'm enthused by her enthusiasm.
It's going to be wonderful to step out of that subject almost completely (the program appears to be truly capable of teaching without parent involvement given a child who is developmentally ready for the material). I'll just hover a short distance away awaiting any cries for help. So far everything is very do-able for her (and we'll stop and step back if it becomes not do-able), but she DOES NOT like getting problems wrong. She didn't miss any problems on her second lesson, but on the first she missed one and made me go back and reset that problem so she could re-do it. Perfectionism is not fun. But, she is who she is, and if 21/22 makes her world go all wobbly, so it goes.
The Literature Pockets were a nice find. We are mostly likely going to do a social studies curriculum next year after all, which will be a Western-heavy survey of the ancient world. This project book on Greek and Roman myths will be fun to work adjacent to that.
We picked up a huge Snap Circuits kit and expansion set, which is something the kid has been asking for for about a year. It was lovely to just grab it off the shelves, check it out and take it home. She begged me to let her do it all morning, and then worked through a bunch of circuits in the afternoon while listening to A Wrinkle in Time on audiobook. She took a break to read the Bruce Colville Romeo and Juliet then went right back into it until dinner time. When the kid found out she gets to keep the Snap Circuits for an entire year I swear she was close to exploding. HUGE grin. It was awesome. We had dinner, played a couple of rounds of Sum Swamp, read some Harry Potter, and called it a night.
It was such a good, good day. Much more akin to how things were in the past. In recent weeks I have experienced overwhelming doubt about the entire home learning project. She had become disengaged and it was flat out unpleasant to be together so intensively. It was painful to go from the sense that I couldn't stop my child from learning to the sense that I was having to force her to learn, but I'm enormously optimistic that it was just a rough patch rather than a metamorphosis.
I think the key piece in all of this is that she needs me to keep the materials coming. I always did that in the past and it worked beautifully. If she has a steady supply of brain food in the form of new books, new music, new films, and new ideas, she positively flourishes. It's out of control and beautiful. If I expect her to go out and forage for herself (by idly telling her to "pick out some books" at the library, or waiting for her to pick up on some new thread of interest rather than being highly responsive to her casual lines of inquiry), she shrivels up and doesn't want to do anything but watch My Little Pony.
Keep that fire burning, Casey Jones!