01.16.09
New Semester!
Day 1 of Second Semester should be a National Holiday, I swear. It’s just such a relief to send off those final portfolio assignments and kind of ’start over’.
We didn’t do TOO badly this time, though. Z ended first semester on the day first semester ended without too much trouble, which was good. N was a little trickier; he ended up with a dearth of Comm Arts lessons pending there at the end, and we had to really work to get the last portfolio assignments in before the deadline. This was largely my fault; N’s lessons tend to be fairly fast and easy, so when it comes down to deciding which kid I need to concentrate on to get stuff done, I tend to put N aside and deal with Z. As a result, Z had all this past week to finish 5 lessons in Math, while N was trying to do six Comm Arts lessons a day to catch back up. I ended up buzzing through the lesson content for the last unit, and that worried me, so I pushed back the start of N’s Comm Arts this semester by a week so we could go back and pick up what I skipped in our rush to get done. So far we’re on track with that too. By next week, when this semester’s Comm Arts start back up, we should be caught up and ready to go.
It’s a nice feeling. 
The boys and I have made a pact that if they get done with each day’s lessons and then decide to work ahead by one day, we’ll take a field trip. So far they’re just so happy to only have to worry about 4-5 lessons a day (only one of which is Comm Arts, in Z’s case) that they just celebrate being done. But Z is a big fan of field trips, so he’s keenly interested to know what sorts of places we’ll go. I’m figuring on a lot of Zoo visits. We still have Zoo Friends membership stuff to use up.
In fact, come to think of it I’d like to get out there this coming week. The Living World is always something we skip because it’s too all-fired crowded during the busy season, but this would actually be the perfect time to go. I think N’s science will start talking about animals and ecosystems here soon, so it’d be a good preamble to that.