wow, this is working well

You know, I was REALLY nervous about how this school year was going to go. I had such a hard time last year, I had no freaking CLUE what to do or expect when I started last year and I got overwhelmed fast and couldn't do it as a result. That ended Melissa in public school January, halfway through her K year. So needless to say, I was just a little apprehensive about how this year would go.

Well this year is the TOTAL opposite of last school year. We are cruising nicely, getting all our assignments done, and I haven't felt this capable in a long time. Lydia is wrapping up her unit on Austrailia this week, Melissa's plugging away nicely on ancient Egypt and the early nomadic life, and both girls are making great progress in their lang. arts, phonics, and math. Science is a bit rough because I really DON'T want to do this one experiment involving melting popsicles in different areas and tracking how long it takes (I've put this one lesson off for a week and a half now) but dangit we are going to do it Saturday if I put it off again tomorrow (I'll make Scott do the actual experiment with her so that I don't have to deal with the mess, I'll teach the lesson though that's before the experiment and I'll observe him doing the experiment and help her record the results of it all but I refuse to melt perfectly good popsicles lol)

In math Melissa's working on subtraction, and Lydia's just finishing up a unit on tally marks and picture graphs. Lydia will take her test today or tomorrow, depending on how fast she moves through the last 3 lessons before it (hey the child is doing 3-6 lessons a day in math, she is soaking it up and retaining like its nothing at all, plus the majority of it so far has been review for her) Melissa last week did an addition unit (ok it was a week and a half unit, remember we do school 6 days a week so that we can take light days if we want and it will all even out in the end) and has nailed her addition up to 6 facts. We haven't memorized them yet, but she's slowly memorizing them as we review them. I'm expecting that the same will happen with our subtraction facts that we're working on now.

Phonics, well Melissa blew by Lydia in that area but she's a year older and I expected it. We are starting unit 8 with Melissa, which I expect her to do in 2 days after reading through the lessons for the unit. Lydia is in unit 7, today she's doing lesson 2. There are 5 lessons in a phonics unit by the way, so in theory we are supposed to finish one unit each week. But Melissa, I'd like her to finish phonics K by Christmas and so far its looking like she will. Lydia will move at whatever her pace is, and if she doesn't finish K phonics by Christmas then we'll just keep going her pace and finish when we do, and I'll fill in with Explode The Code or something like that to keep her skills up.

Yep, its a good year so far for us, we are having a blast doing all the work that we have. I'm REALLY glad that we stuck with OHVA for this year instead of trying to go independent. Its really helped me to stay on track to do lessons daily, given me the structure that I need to stay consistent, and its made life easy because I just have to look at the computer screen and do what it says to for each lesson to teach it instead of trying to figure it out on my own.

I do believe we found our niche in the homeschooling community, even if we aren't "real" homeschoolers because we aren't independent. I know my limits, and a virtual academy is my limit at this point. We may go independent later, as all 4 kids join in on lessons, but for now it TOTALLY works for me to do this way. We're good, lessons are good, life is good. The only downside is that I'm cycling again so I've hit a paranoid phase. Its definitely making things interesting, I hope this doesn't last long and that the depression I'm going to enter doesn't last long either (I don't usually get manic stages with my type of bipolar disorder, if your curious I'm a type II bipolar, which is much closer to some more serious diagnoses than I'd like to be)