What We’re Up To!

The past two weeks have been rather chaotic here. This is a busy time of year in our town. There are tons of festivals and things happening before it gets too hot outside. I’ve attended a conference and we’re now hosting my FIL and nephew for a week. The TOS Homeschool Crew activities are also ramping up. We’ve gotten our initial materials about the program and joined our small group as well as the main forum. Needless to say, there are a lot of balls in the air right now. We are having fun, we just need to go with the flow a little more.

Tornado Boy has been having a blast. We’ve been on a bunch of playdates and he also had his first week of camp. He’s been enjoying the festivals, trying new things and getting out and about. I think we’ve hit every “sprayground” in town in the past two weeks. It’s nice that they’re not completely overrun busy since school isn’t out yet.

We’ve been pretty relaxed with our schooling while things are so crazy. We do like to fit in a bit of learning here and there while we’re out, though. I love these tile boards at our local playground. They’re great for playing with patterns.

We’ve been testing out a couple of programs here at home. I picked up a copy of Wordly Wise 3000, book 2 at our homeschool conference. I’d been to their website before, but I hadn’t used the books. I’m still on the fence about teaching spelling this year, but I really wanted to make sure that we’re working on vocabulary. I entered the word lists from the book into Spelling City so that we could play around with the words. Tornado Boy absolutely loved it and quickly learned the meanings of the first lesson’s words. Wordly Wise has much better definitions for the words, but Spelling City has a huge number of options to use with the words. You can create writing worksheets, play games, learn the spellings and take tests. I definitely think this will be a good fit for us this fall.

Another thing that we’ve been testing out is Time4Learning. The Homeschool Buyer’s Co-op has a $5 for one month trial right now. We’ve used it 3 or 4 times in the past couple of weeks and I really am liking the way that it works. It’s really what I wish Rusty and Rosy had been like. It’s got a good amount of flexibility for setting up lessons for the student. I typically sit with Tornado Boy as he works through the lessons. I was easily able to change his grade level after a few lessons. I also like that we can take a test for a level in advance to see if we need to cover the material or not. We can move on at will. I like the variety of topics and the characters are engaging. The only thing that I really don’t care for is the “playground” which is really just a bunch of websites like PBS Kids. You can set up the amount of time that the child can use the playground for, but I’d rather select the sites by hand that I want my child to use. I’m not sure if I want to pay $20/month for Time4Learning, but I may consider it if I find that we need to supplement our regular curriculum. Tornado Boy really likes it.

So anyway, we’re here, just crazy busy and having lots of fun!