Today marks the end of the first three weeks of our sorta homeschooling year, and things are going pretty well. We start every morning at 9. More of less. Poppy’s classes are meeting on Zoom, so she has to be there at 9. Pete and I have a little more leeway, but we’ve been starting by 9:30 every day. We all take a break at noon and eat lunch together, and that’s reliably one of my favorite parts of the day.

The first two weeks of class at Poppy’s school were in-person orientation for the kids who plan to attend in person, after spending the first six weeks of school entirely online. She’s not one of those kids, so her first two weeks were pretty boring. Classes started in earnest this week, though, so she’s had more work to do. And she’s been happy about that. She’s taking Math 2, Intermediate Art, Intermediate Theater and honors English 2 this year, all from the dining room table. I’m not so involved with her day-to-day, so I can’t tell you exactly what she’s working on right now. I do know that she’s reading “Julius Caesar” for English and that her theater class watched a production of “Shrek: The Musical” today.

Pete and I had a few difficulties during the first week, but we’ve smoothed them out for the most part. I was scheduling breaks here and there, but we found that he does better when he can take breaks when he feels like he needs them. So he has three “tickets” each good for a 5-minute break that he can use throughout the day. He usually takes one 10-minute break at some point. The other thing that made a huge difference should’ve been obvious from the start: Snacks. We now have a snack basket in the room with us, and I keep a cooler with some drinks out there, too.

(And by “out there,” I mean in the studio that is now our schoolroom. The previous owner of our house was a puppeteer who built a small studio in the backyard in which to craft puppets. We are eternally grateful for the space, especially now, even though it may or may not be haunted by puppet spirits. Incidentally, Pete learned in his study of Greek and Latin roots this week that the fear of puppets is called pupaphobia.)

If you’re interested, here’s a bit more about what Pete and I have been doing in his hybrid homeschool year:

Language Arts

Pete likes to start his day with reading, and this week he finished “Allies” by Alan Gratz. This one was all free reading for him, and he said he enjoyed the book. Next week we’ll start doing more in-depth reading with a return to Reed Novel Studies. We’re starting with “Piecing Me Together” by Renee Watson.

We’ve also been doing Spelling Power, English from the Roots Up and Writing Strands daily. That sounds like a lot, I think, but none of the three takes a huge amount of time.

Social Studies

We’re using History Odyssey’s Early Modern curriculum, and this week we learned that the Thirty Years War was brutal. We’re still reading the recommended text, but we’re supplementing it with Crash Course History videos when we can because the text is really dry.

Math & science

Pete is taking math and science through our local school system. The courses are asynchronous, which means there isn’t a designated meeting time for instruction.

Math and science both run through the local school system and are pretty similar. Pete watches some instructional videos and works through some questions before taking a quiz. The science curriculum has been a little more interesting than math, because the teacher has assigned some hands-on stuff. The same teacher facilitates both classes, but the instructional videos are recorded by different people. Pete calls one of the math guy Frank, but I don’t think he’s named the science guy yet.

Coding

The coding class is taught by someone at an undisclosed location, and Pete hasn’t been terribly happy with it. It’s also part of the school system’s virtual academy, but it’s not taught by someone in our district. We don’t know exactly where she’s based. The class is mostly just text on the screen, and there isn’t much explanation for why a particular piece of code does or doesn’t work. I haven’t been terribly impressed with it, and Pete finds it frustrating. The good news is that it’s a one-semester course, so at least he only has a few months of it.

Cooking

We’re doing a Kitchen Lab once a week, using the Young Chefs Club boxes from America’s Test Kitchen. The first recipe we made was for Cloud Eggs — basically an egg yolk baked on top of a meringue. It was pretty but tasted not-so-great. Today we made a Magical Chocolate Flan Cake. I’m hoping it’s better than the eggs were. It has to chill for at least 8 hours, so it’ll be tomorrow before we know for sure.