Gettin' Schooled

Oh my, I have been lazy about my blogging. Terribly lazy. Who-da-thunk that this homeschooling thing would take such time. Every.day. Well, every.week.day. Combine that with a recent thinning of my bloggy mojo, and you get a lazy blogger. I'm assuming that the thin-bloggy-mojo is cyclical. Afterall, I'm a girl -- I come wired to assume things are cyclical, I guess.

So here are the highlights:

School. As in the {Urban} Country Day Academy. {fill in our real last name in the brackets} It's mentioned in the URL of this site and in my friendly introductory paragraph, which is much like myself IRL -- friendly and chatty, yet guarded to the general public.

But to the point. {Urban} CDA is named that because I grew up in St. Louis, and the hoitiest of the toitiest schools there were This-N-That Country Day Academy. Find one of the Busch kids or a kid of an executive for AG Edwards, Purina, McDonnell Douglas (now BOING!BOING!BOING!), a kid of a baseball player, whatevah, and you'd likely find him/her at a school with the term Country Day Academy in the name. I went to a public school that was pretty good at the time, but that I wouldn't send my kids to now, no-how, no-way. And the MIL -- oh, the piece of work that is the MIL -- wanted the Urban Kids to go to one of Chicago's hoity-toity private schools. She offered to foot the bill, even (post financial aid filings). But here's the thing -- she's an evil psycho. And Urban Dad & I were not going to dance on her strings.

So {Urban} Country Day Academy. Under Illinois law, homeschoolers are considered their own private school. {Urban} CDA only allows two students and no more, so there ya go -- pretty damn private, huh?  The tuition is pretty reasonable for a boarding school.  And no pressure to carry a $200 purse to Geometry class or to feel like a loozah because you didn't spend Christmas in Portugal.  And when you pack up your studies to visit the St. Louis campus (aka: Best Namma Ever!'s house), you can rest assured that you won't have to do squat.

We're about six weeks into school now. We're finding our routine; Urban Kid 1 & I are finding our groove. She can't stand Math; I am resisting letting her opt into the Girl Who Hates Math stereotype. She's been informed that when she finishes this:

and this:

that they will drop from the schedule and will not be replaced by anything new.

This makes her happy because she knows that when we finish this:

that this will come immediately on its heels:

She's doing 1st grade Math, Writing, Handwriting, History & Science; 2nd grade spelling; reading at almost a 4th grade level. If she was in the Chicago system, she'd have started Kindergarten six weeks ago.

She has a daily list that varies a bit from day to day. When we finish something, she gets to take her write-on-wipe-off marker and scratch -- ok, slash -- it off of the list.

The whole thing that we're doing here is very structured and procedural. It's how her parents are wired, so it's how she has to roll right now.

That said, now that we feel like this is actually working and my muttering fears in the back of my brain that I am going to be an abysmal failure at this whole weird idea and irreversably wreck two innocent human beings along the way are quieting down, we're blowing off most of this week.

It's Field Trip Week!

More soon!