I have been meaning to post a detailed "Year In Review" post but I just can't seem to get around to it. Here's the Reader's Digest version of what I learned this year.
- Oak Meadow is perfect for us. The upper elementary (we were in year 5) is much more involved than I had anticipated, and some weeks we had difficulty covering everything completely, mostly because I didn't use only Oak Meadow. I had too many other things in our schedule.
- Sometimes less is more. (See #1)
- Swinging helps Thing 4 concentrate. I started noticing that if she was having difficulty focusing on, say...Math, she would ask if she could go swing. When she came back in, her concentration was better. (Everything is relative.) I've talked to other moms who have kids
with attention issues who are especially creative, and they have noticed this, too. Interesting.
- MCT Language Arts is fabulous, especially the Caesar's English portion. (Thanks, Melanie).
- Life of Fred...also a fabulous curriculum. We use this to supplement Singapore Math. It is great for developing higher level thinking skills.
- Singapore Math is perfect for Thing 3, not so much for Thing 4. We are switching to Oak Meadow Math for her next year.
- It's great to be able to tailor instruction and expectations to each child's learning style, personality and activity level. (See #3 and #6.)
- As Latin goes, Lively Latin is a really good curriculum. It's a nice mix of the basics of Latin combined with history, games, art history and puzzles. The online resource is very good, also. That said, we are dropping Latin next year. (See #2.)
- Rosetta Stone is a great way to learn a foreign language.
- It's worth paying for a good art class.
- We should have planned more field trips and done less "school". Thing 3 was verging on burn-out by the end of the year. (See #2.)
- CiCi's pizza is over-priced and under-good. We go there anyway.
- Otherwise Educating is great. Summer is greater.
