I am now preparing for the sixth week of Foundations and Essentials—halfway home for the semester and a quarter of the way done! I think the hardest part for me so far has been keeping up with consistently practicing the memory work. The weeks when I work consistently thirty minutes a day practicing the Foundations material, I have much more confidence than during the weeks when I skip practicing. I also do not have a CD player in my car; if I did, then I would have the Audio CD’s and would be able to review memory work in the car. I think that would help me with the timeline—boy does that timeline get long fast!
This past week our usual tutor had a family emergency and our group had to be divided up into other classes for the day. The seven boys were split up and added into three all-girl groups. Now, not all campuses spilt up into male and female groups. My campus was not divided like this last year, but it just happened to work out that way this year. So, we had to sit with the girls. Queue the horror music. We managed to survive. It was fun for me to see how another tutor presented the material. The focus and style were different, but the material was obviously the same. Both tutors do a wonderful job, and you can tell the children are learning a lot—which means the parents are doing what needs to be done at home.
To me, splitting up was a testimony to the flexibility of homeschooling and how social we homeschoolers actually are. Could you imagine what would happen if this were done in another educational setting? Nothing would have been learned, students would have acted up, and the day would have been wasted. Due to the social, non-politically correct character traits we learn in homeschooling—such as honor, respect, and love—the transition was easy.
This past weekend, I was at the Clemson vs. FSU football game with South Carolina State Manager Julie Denton and Georgia State Manager Julie Melendez and their husbands. They quizzed my knowledge of the memory work, and I passed. They asked me about George Washington and then told me I had to sing the sentence. I am not a good singer, but I managed to make it through unscathed.
