Week 18 in Review -- Midyear Summary

I am taking a break from my Schola et Studium blog so for the time being, the weeks in review are coming over here. Previous ones are here and here. In case you don't already know, we do a blend of classical, Charlotte Mason, and unschooling. I do a sort of not-very-intense LCC for the basics (which are to me Math--Language/Latin/Greek--Literature), use Charlotte Mason ideas for the "atmosphere, discipline, and life" (habits, nature study, living books) and the unschooly ideas sort of flow around the edges in my theories and principles and how we make our educational decisions around here.... This has evolved through the years of finding what works for us and the balance changes from season to season and year to year. Anyway....you can see the Week in Review Mr Linky over at Trivium Academy.

This week in review also happens to be a mid-year review since last week we reached 90 days – halfway through the school year. Hooray!

Looking at the progress charts for the 3Rs, I was happy to see that we are closer to track than I had thought. You can click on the charts to make them bigger. This is for a just-turned 15 year old in "Year 9" and a just-turned 12 year old in "Year 6" (both their birthdays were in January and the older one's was just this week)

This chart is year 9 for the basic subjects. Logic took a hit, and so did Latin, when the Algebra started taking up a bigger part of the day.

Here is Year 6. I had handwriting down, and it transferred to spelling, and I didn't know quite how to work it so that it showed easily on the chart. So that looks a bit worse than it actually is.

Here is Year 9 -- readings and narrations. I stopped keeping conscientious records on these ones sometime in December, plus we let science take a back seat.

Here is Year 6 -- a partial list of readings and narrations.

General Notes and Thoughts:

I don't have my oldest scholar, a senior in high school, on the charts because she is quite independent and keeps her own records. Nor do I have the little ones on here. Paddy is a kindergartener and Aidan, who functions between late kindergarten and early first grade, is special needs and I find it very difficult indeed to project where he will be in a given amount of time.

Looking at these charts, I am a bit relieved because I thought we had fallen further behind than we had in fact. But I see what we need to focus on and that would be, um, writing. We do some written narrations but there is room for lots of improvement. My older children learned to write happily and competently just by example, time and plenty of cooperative projects. Basically we unschooled writing, in a word-rich environment. But for this set, I would like to focus on it a bit differently. So that's something to ponder and plan for.

Anyway, that is a long enough post for now. Overall, we had a good week. The first couple of weeks after resuming our studies after Christmas were a bit rocky, mostly for me changing tracks back from lots of free time to not very much. But now I've resigned myself and am back to having fun planning history and literature and trying to plan our progym.