School Year Update

We are almost two-thirds of the way through our first 12 week term. Of course, I've had to do some tweaking here and there just like all the school years past.

Here's the tweaks I've made for Zach my 11th grader...

-dropped Age of Revolution by Churchill
-substituting The Struggle for Sea Power by Synge
-Miracle at Philadelphia dropped
-Gulliver's Travels on hold until next term
-added The Invisible Man
-added Dating With Integrety
-dropped German Demystified
-dropped IEW's The Elegant Essay
-substituted Jensen's Format Writing, The Book on Writing: The Ultimate Guide to Writing Well and creative writing prompts from Jump In
-Shadow of the Almighty put on hold until later in the school year (or maybe even next summer's reading list)

And his homeschool PE class has also started back up again. We didn't think the gym that offered this last year was going to offer it again. We are both SO pleased the gym decided to offer this again. It pushes him to exercise vigorously on a regular basis.

Now for my 8th grade Jake's tweaks...

-dropped IEW's All Things Fun and Fascinating (keeping this on hold until either later in the school year or  maybe next year)
-replaced the above mentioned IEW program with writing from KWOs (no IEW dress-ups) using simple paragraphs found at the IEW yahoo group files *and* dictation
-Just *today* ordered First Language Lessons level 3 and Writing With Ease level 3...will replace the above mentioned mom-created grammar and writing lessons
-dropped Draw Squad (wayyyyy tooo easy for him)
-added Artistic Pursuits (but still looking...he doesn't really like Artistic Pursuits...he's asked for a "live" person to teach him art...looking for someone affordable:)

Jake has been running with a local small private classical Christian school's cross country team again this year. Their regular season ends tomorrow (regional and state championships next month if we qualify). He will be playing basketball again this year with the same school. Practices for basketball began a couple of weeks ago.

Between school, the boy's outside activities *and* mom trying to exercise herself a LOT each day, we are staying very busy. Not too busy. Just busy enough to take our minds off the fact that my dh is having to travel an extreme amount for the past 3 months for weeks at a time.