Beginning a Formal Education

I forgot my password to Library Thing so I had to start a new account. Lesson learned: Always add an email address even if you don't want to so that you can retrieve your forgotten passwords when needed. Or at least let Firefox remember your passwords for ease of use.

Making a new account reminded me that I hadn't updated to a lifetime account yet. If this were just something for myself I wouldn't have done it but because I'm using it to keep track of information for home schooling I went ahead and upgraded. Now I can add as many books as I like. That's great because we've already reached the limit of 200 books that the free accounts get. I've been keeping track on my computer and haven't gotten around to adding the books to Library Thing but I'll do that in the next few days.

I'm debating buying Singapore Math for Fin and Dul to begin a math program. Singapore is cheap and I've heard great things about it.

This Monday Fin and I are beginning kindergarten. We've done some warm up but I've gathered enough of my basic curriculum to go ahead and get serious. It will still be very relaxed, I'm just adding a little sit down work in English and math. Right now we're using various math workbooks that I've bought over the years for the math. For English we're using Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading . Dul and I will be starting at the beginning, Fin is beginning to read so we'll skip the first few lessons that would surely bore him and we'll get started with the lessons that start teaching words.

With the rate that Fin is progressing right now I'll take a guess and say that we'll start the first grade materials this winter when he turns five. Of course, everything will be entirely at his pace so it may be earlier or later than that. I've chosen to take an eclectic Classical approach. Traditionally that would mean that I'd teach a classic language (Latin or Greek are the most popular) as the kids' foreign language. That presents itself as a problem as I've already made the decision to help my children be bilingual at the least. Because of that I've decided to put off the classic language until later years. I'm teaching the kids to read and write in English first. First grade will bring German reading/writing and after that will be Spanish. I also think that Mandarin or Japanese (I'll let each child choose between the two) writing should come before the classic language so we're looking at introducing it closer to middle school than elementary. I may just skip it entirely but I'm not going to make a formal decision on that now.