Last Days of the School Year

Final grades are due on Friday, so today and tomorrow morning are the last chances for the boys to finish up work for this official school year.  A couple weeks ago I truly was panicking, thinking that we were much too far behind.  But I guess it isn't really that bad.  Even the textbooks that we didn't finish, we completed much more than half, and it WILL get done during "summer school" so I'm trying not to feel guilty that we're a bunch of slackers. 

 

All that being said, there are two subjects that I expected Harrison would finish by now, but we are having to adjust so that he will finish them over the summer or in first semester of next year.  Photography course for Fine Arts - he got off to a good start with that one, but then came the company, his job, and some delays in getting the camera ready... eventually we just put it off.  I figured he could do it over the summer and I'll give him the credit at the end of the first semester next school year.  Science wound up being the same way.  He just hasn't enjoyed it, and I feel bad because everyone else raved about Apologia Science and how wonderful it is, even high schoolers I talked to said it was enjoyable and interesting.  Well, everyone's different, I guess, and my kid is an exception to this.  (This is Exploring Creation through Biology, by the way)   This text starts with single-celled organisms and then moves to the more complex, and Harrison was not really engaged in the study of amebas, shall we say.  LOL  So... he avoided working on it, and added to his insistence that he can indeed concentrate with the radio on etc (he can't, and I hope that I have allowed him to figure this out on his own) it was just slow going.  I think he's maybe a third of the way through the book. *sigh*  So, again, I decided to not beat a dead horse - we'll take a break from that and he will have to finish it by the end of first semester.  Fortunately, he only needs TWO science credits instead of three or four, and he is not planning on entering a science-intensive field of study in college, so this should be okay.  My concern is that if decides to be a slacker, he will wind up needing to cram a whole lot of credits into his junior and senior years, rather than get as many credits as possible completed in freshman and sophomore years.  I remember making those decisions when I was in high school and I planned it so that my senior year had a pretty light course load.  In fact I think I did all my academics except English in first semester and literally coasted through the last semester of high school because all the "hard" work was done!  But - while Harrison is very much like me (this is scary in some respects!) he is NOT me, and he will have to make his own decisions about how to manage his time. 

 

I am getting anxious to start working on my lesson plans for next year, and figuring out what exactly we'll need to accomplish during "summer school" but I am waiting until I've finalized this year's grades. The books for next year are all waiting in a box IN MY LIVING ROOM! LOL 

 

I also realized that we may actually follow the school calendar next year.    This will be new.  LOL  But it will be the first year since we started homeschooling (if memory serves) that:

1. we will not take family vacation during the fall.  We generally take our 2-week vacation somewhere between September and November; in 2006 it was in the beginning of December, which interrupts the first semester considerably.  Added to the time off that is inevitable for Thanksgiving and Christmas, this has in past years hurt our momentum.


2. we will not (as far as I know) have family visiting for extended periods during the school year.  This has its drawbacks, of course, because it means we won't be seeing family as much.  But it really is hard to keep up a school schedule when grandparents are visiting.  It's still possible that my aunts or my inlaws will want to come sometime in the spring, but that is a long way off and there are no plans for that on the horizon.

This means that I will delay starting the school year until somewhere around Labour Day.  Good news indeed for the kids, since I will be requiring more work during Summer School than in past years.  Once I get the lesson planning underway and can compare that to my calendar, we'll see how it will all work out.  I just hope that I don't get overconfident and wind up at the beginning of June 2008 panicking that we will not get "enough" done for the final report cards!