It may be the nesting taking over a bit, but I’ve been quite busy lately. This is quite a change from the “drag myself to do anything” energy level I’d been feeling for a couple months, alhamdulilah! I remember after having Little Miss, we ate out a LOT because I just didn’t feel like cooking. This time around I’m trying to save us some money and get a stock pile of frozen dinners saved up. So far I have minestrone, beef stew, and the dry ingredients for gluten free pizza saved up. For being 19 weeks, this is a decent start!
College prep… oh what a monster this can be! We are on this college exam train, and inshaAllah we want to take it all the way; how exciting and overwhelming at the same time! Care Bear is currently prepping for the DSST Astronomy exam via the links on free-clep-prep.com. It’s fun to see her get excited all over again for Astronomy, like she did when she took the class at the co-op. We get to hear all sorts of fun facts about different planets and stars over dinner, and when we got an iPad to borrow from hubby’s work, we used and app to check out the night sky. Care Bear really enjoyed laying a quilt out in the back yard and finding the various stars. Plus, aiming it at someone’s head and finding out what star they are was fun too, hehe!
Like I mentioned yesterday, we have the books for the next exam we are planning, DSST Intro to World Religions, and I started making a study plan for what chapters to read each day. Wow, this is not going to be an easy task for Care Bear! Fortunately, I found the CLEP Analyse and Interpret Literature she can do at the end of this school year, and that should be relatively easy because we are working on it already using Figuratively Speaking. She should do a review before taking the exam, but she will have covered most of the material already.
Last night I stayed up past midnight looking at what tests have common themes and can be largely studied together, and what exams hit multiple goal areas at the college Care Bear is aiming to go. One tip, if you have a child in 5th grade or higher, don’t wait until high school to make plans for college. We would be missing out on a lot of opportunity if we weren’t starting to work on our plans now. I actually feel a bit behind the 8-ball working on this in 8th grade! InshaAllah next year almost all of the exams will be tied into a course she’s already doing at home, and not adding extra study time to her days.
Little Miss isn’t left out of all the fun, no way! We got to paint yesterday using packing peanuts, which she thought was a ton of fun! She happened to have a wet wipe nearby and learned how to erase her work, too! She loved using the packing peanuts as little stamps for her paint, and she even did pretty well not mixing up all the paint colors. We are working on recognizing red right now, and learning the sign in ASL. Honestly, she seems to not care, but we’ll keep moving forward with the colors. I didn’t think she cared every time I would point out the letter A in books, and then she pointed it out when reading with her dad! So, the next color is blue! We already started focusing on finding the letter C in our books, and the number 2.
I’ve added Before Five in a Row to my wish list of books for Little Miss, along with BOB Books: Alphabet and Pre-Reading Skills. Little Miss loves to read books, and with potty training, we have more down time than usual, so it works out!
I feel like my head is in a million places, but I have to say that homeschooling is so rewarding. I wouldn’t have it any other way, alhamdulilah.
“If you have a child in 5th grade or higher, don’t wait until high school to make plans for college” — this is so true! It certainly saves a lot of time and anxiety being prepared for what’s ahead. And it doesn’t help that kids these days seem to need so much more “extra” to get ahead, whether it’s extracurriculars, awards, scholarships, or (later on) internships… It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by all the things that we feel we need to do so far ahead of time!
The extras are overwhelming! There aren’t enough hours in the day to fit in everything we are “supposed” to do. Hopefully we pick the right things that will make a difference in the future. One can pray, at least.
Good plan! Picking the important things — or the things the kids are most interested in pursuing — definitely helps give some priority to the “things you’re supposed to do to succeed” list. Though it’s unfortunate that some of the important things aren’t the fun things. 🙂
Absolutely! I wish Care Bear’s fencing counted as college credits, too! 🙂