Four Year Checkpoint

With this Christmas break marking the anniversary of when Monkey left public school, it's now been 4 full years of homeschooling! I can't believe I've now been doing this for almost as long as Monkey was in public school (4.5 years). It's been a great journey, and I definitely feel that not only are the kids learning, but I'm learning as well! I definitely did not know this much World History until now and I'm re-learning Chinese (well, I'm not even sure I knew this much Chinese before, but I might have, and then forgotten many of the Chinese characters that the kids are learning. I certainly can read much better than I could before!)

This is the first year that I've actually kept a gradebook and given them tests and scored their assignments. They've actually been responding quite well to this. It's more work on my part, but in preparation for doing transcripts from high school, I started grading this year.  This fall we also started doing more formal grammar, as Monkey started an online English class.  I'm learning from the class teacher what things I need to cover for Bunny.

Anyway, I don't post much here anymore, but I do think taking stock of the year and setting up goals for the next year has been helpful for me, so I'll do it again this year.

Looking back at last year's goals that I set:

1. More cooking- We did fairly regularly up until this fall, when we stopped doing this weekly. Now it's more like 1-2 times a month, but I'm hoping to restart once-a-week cooking for both kids in the new year.
2. More writing-We did better on this for this fall, than last spring. We did do more writing in general though, even starting from last spring, but since Monkey started taking an online English class which includes writing, this has forced us to have more writing each week. I have been having Bunny do the same writing assignments that Monkey does with his class.
3. More note-taking skills - The kids are doing all their lessons independently now, so I just assign the pages to read and they take notes. We still need to work on note-taking in a 'live lesson', so when we've watched videos, I recently started having them take notes during the video, and I plan to continue doing that in the new year. 
4. More friends - The co-op friends are 'gelling' more and more, and having the after-co-op playground games of Capture the Flag have definitely given them more of a social outlet.  Bunny's new friend from last year got us connected to a First Lego League robotics team (and then we pulled in Monkey's old friend from public school) where the kids were able to have some more regular contact with kids their age this fall, so that was a great addition.  We find that outside of co-op time though, we don't really get together with other homeschool families. Bunny was able to do a "Education Fair" project with one of her friends from co-op in the spring, and that was fun for her.  
5. More logical thinking- Our co-op is running a Critical Thinking/Logic class for middle schoolers this year so got that covered! 

For the year ahead, I'm hoping to work on these new goals

• Coding-They've gotten pretty good at Scratch and Monkey  has done some HTML and JavaScript coding, but Bunny has only recently been introduced to written code. We'll probably use Khan Academy for this.
• Electives- I've always encouraged them to do their own "Free Exploration" after finishing their work, but haven't really pinned them down on systematically learning something of their choice. Some ideas that they've come up with are piano, flute, sewing,  probability and statistics, or art.
• Classic literature - Not sure what we will read but I'd like to add some classic novels to our reading.  In general, Bunny reads a lot, but all of it is contemporary. Monkey doesn't read that much for leisure so I'd have to assign reading anyway, might as well introduce some classics. 

We will definitely continue with the things that we started working on this year, but as those become more routine I'm hoping to add these other goals in.