October

I still have not heard from the home school coordinator yet about F's IHIP..although I was told that they will get to it and to wait for my letter of compliance once it has been reviewed...never mind that I sent it in August and now we are in the 2ND week of October....they are so busy with all the hs'ers they have to deal with and it being it's only 2 of them in the office.....
I know what I wrote complies with state standards so I'm not worried,we are doing our thing as far as what we are learning. I already wrote out my 1st quarterly and will send it when it's time at the end of this month.
Today F watched a special about Columbus and his lost voyage, it was a 2 hour show and I found it very informative, and F learned things about Columbus and about history that I know he would have never done in school. I learned things and continue to learn things that I never did in school. He built a triangular housing area for his soldiers complete with a Canadian flag, from cardboard and foil and tape. I swear he can play with his soldiers every day and not get bored. Things have been creative around here the last few days, they made paper puppets today, all three made a different one, with googly eyes and hair etc...finger painted yesterday, F made a really nice looking painting that he folded in half and made into a creative mirror image. It looks interesting and I was a little proud of him because he made a mistake while painting but he didn't get upset, he just went with the flow and made it into something else.
He finished writing his report on Romanian animals for the club tomorrow, and he has been writing a little here and there for his song writing class. He has some ideas but I think he just doesn't know how to express them in writing form. We are working on that, he is still writing about his friend W and it's coming along OK I guess. We went to the class on Tuesday and he kind of got the point about what he needs to do for his song. We hung out at the home school mom's house afterwards for a few hours while the kids got to play with friends. I still laugh when I think about how worried ppl are about home schoolers not being 'socialized'.

He is also doing a lot of math because he has a ton of workbooks and I told him to do at least 1 math page a day. We also go over the multiplication tables verbally here and there. I think he needs to see a problem written down before he can really grasp it. Although he is doing well with multiplication is his head when I ask him questions....

We read about the origin of Halloween from one of the library books I borrowed last week, found a great site on line that lets you put all the countries of the world in the place they belong continent by continent. It also has the capitals for each country that you can drag onto the country itself. F loves geography and he asked me to find him something where he can learn the capitals of the countries because he already knows the capitals of all 50 states. I said ok and started looking online and stumbled onto the site. He has played it for at least 2 hours all together already. I also found 2 more sites for him to play math games according to his grade level. There are so many wonderful resources online for home schoolers, especially for younger children who are below the 8Th grade.