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Payments Hit and Homeschool Stuff

January 4th, 2013 at 08:01 pm

The BoA payment I made yesterday posted. DH's hotel for his trip up, travel food, and our gym membership hit today, so the new balance is up a bit from what I said yesterday to $5,610.74.

The mortgage payment posted this morning. I made a payment of $570. Of that $68.51 went to interest and the rest to principal. The new mortgage balance is $14,446.84. My goal for February is to bring that under $14K. I am trying to pay off $500 worth of principal each month right now. I will reassess my mortgage goals after the credit card debt is paid off and I know what is going on with paychecks with the new tax laws.

Homeschool went okay yesterday, it just took forever. Although I understood the math right away (totally new concept to me) it took DS longer to cotton on to it. We are doing rays and angles and line segments, and defining whether the measured angle pairs are complimentary or supplementary or neither. The lesson ended up taking 90 minutes instead of the usual hour.

Then history took a lot longer than usual. Sometimes the curriculum splits stuff up in really stupid ways. Wednesday's history only took a half an hour while yesterday's took 90 minutes. If they divided it up better it would come to an hour a day. One day you are reading 3 pages in the history book and the next day you are reading two chapters.

It wouldn't be so bad, but we started The Secret Garden yesterday. Normally literature lessons consist of one short story or 3 or 4 poems that are read and then questions are answered about plot and character development or in the case of poems, analyzed. But when he needs to do actual books, which happens twice a semester, they divide it into ten lessons, no matter how long the book is. So he ends up reading 30 to 40 pages a day for that which wouldn't take too long, except it is using regional dialect.

Now I personally hate dialect in books. It's a pet peeve of mine. It's overdone and it makes things difficult to read. It's enough to say, hey, these people are from Yorkshire, they talk a little different and maybe give a bit of the flavor of it, but not pound the reader over the head with it. On top of that it also is using old-fashioned language so things like thyself instead of yourself are used. But when you use dialect, it's thysen instead of theyself, or youn'un instead of young one. Then a ton of questions afterwards so literature is ending up taking way, way too long.

Now all that would be fine in high school, but this is 7nth grade. We were already at 5 hours for the day with only those 3 subjects. Add on top of that grammar and usage, vocabulary, composition and either art or science, plus 20 minutes a day for PE and we were at around 8 hours and school is only supposed to take 5 and a half hours per day. We were both cranky by the time we finished.

I ended up reserving the unabridged book on CD. I'm going to allow DS to read along with the CD instead so that he isn't struggling with dialect and old-fashioned language and we can get through it faster. Fortunately the library had it in so I can just go down and pick it up today.

Hopefully today will go better. We haven't started yet as DS didn't sleep last night and I let him sleep in. I think he's coming down with what DD has. *sighs* Me, too, maybe as I didn't sleep all that well either. Well, I was well for a whole week. That's better than nothing.

4 Responses to “Payments Hit and Homeschool Stuff”

  1. ThriftoRama Says:
    1357334290

    I definitely respect the time, effort, and organization you give to homeschooling. I don't think I have it in me, although I hope I will be able to supplement whatever the children are learning in school in the after hours.

  2. FrugalTexan75 Says:
    1357349801

    The Secret Garden is one of my favorite books ... but it doesn't seem like a great choice for 7th grade ... more of a 5th grade level book (maybe.) It's too bad they don't offer choices of what book each student can read.

    Have you talked to the program director about how long it is taking sometimes to do these subjects?

  3. LuckyRobin Says:
    1357363022

    Thrift--One does what one must when the school system fails. It takes more patience than I ever thought I would have.

    Laura--They do offer choices. They give us a list to choose from. Most of the higher level books for this semeseter he had already read and didn't want to read again. It was either this or Tom Sawyer and he has no interest in Tom Sawyer. He did not like Huckleberry Finn. Next semester we get to choose from a different list and there is much more on it he has never read. We're leaning towards Island of the Blue Dolphins and Across Five Aprils. I'm a little tempted to have him read Jacob Have I Loved, just because I enjoyed it so much, but I think he would rather the others as he does not tend to like stories where one child is favored over the other and he does like stories of survival.

  4. FrugalTexan75 Says:
    1357421136

    Oh, that's good they offer choices.. I love both books you mentioned, but for a boy I think I'd go for Across Five Aprils.. Smile

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