Learning, Exploring and Discovering: Our Homeschool Life: Beginning of the 2017-2018 School Year

This year we have a junior high student and a high school student. We began our homeschool studies in August. Ellie is a part time student at Western Christian High School this year. She began classes there in September. These pictures were from our first day of homeschooling.

Josh was finding his work last year pretty easy, so this year I am challenging him a bit. For Bible he is studying the book of Proverbs with a study called Wise Up: Wisdom in Proverbs from Positive Action for Christ. We are using IEW for grammar and writing. His least favorite subject is Geography, although it started getting less difficult once he began learning about countries instead of just geography concepts. Josh is doing Pre-Algebra for math which is one of his favorite subjects. His second favorite subject is science and this year he is covering general science. Josh attends Friday school with our homeschool group where he takes art, science and P.E. He also did golf lessons during the fall. He's doing fabulous.

Ellie has a very different schedule this year. At home she is doing Bob Jones English, Algebra with Monarch online and a Photography class with National Geographic's Great Courses. With our homeschool group she is taking an American Sign Language (ASL) class. At the high school she takes Bible and Speech. She made the JV volleyball team and was a starter playing middle blocker. Her schedule was pretty busy the first two months with practices and games after school. While she is doing fantastic with her classes outside of home, she has found keeping up with her homeschool work more challenging. I needed to work with her more and we've struggled with a regular routine. She'll be caught up by the end of Christmas break and then we'll work on a keeping up with things at home. I need to keep up with studying as well! Besides playing volleyball, Ellie enjoyed going to camp at Hume Lake in September and attending home football games with friends. She joined several clubs and attends a Bible study on Fridays at lunch. She also participated in the first Talent Night the school had. She really likes her two teachers and they are fond of her as well. She is planning to try out for the spring musical second semester. We really like WCHS and are finding it a great fit for Ellie and we're proud of Ellie for how well she is doing there.

Freshman Orientation in August had us ready for school to begin there.