It's December!

I'm not entirely sure how it's happened, but it's December already. 

K is on something of a roll with maths at the moment.  She's spending quite a lot of time on Khan Academy and is working through the 6th grade 'mission' at a pretty fast rate.  6th grade in the US is the equivalent of year 7 here and it was after using Khan Academy for a while but without any particular aim that I suggested she could use the school year mission as a way of having something to aim at.  It seemed to make more sense to go for an earlier year to build confidence and K was happy with that.  She started this in earnest in September I think and had already completed some of the 6th grade mission completed and she's now at 65% complete and adding another few percent each time she goes on the website, which is most days.  She is also insisting on doing all of the maths involved in her science homework (this week that was working out the density of various objects given their volume and mass) on paper and refusing to use a calculator! 

Her English course is coming on rather more slowly; from my point of view rather frustratingly so.  K can take half an hour or more to write just a couple of lines of the short story that is the final task of the second unit.  I'm never entirely sure how much this is due to K getting distracted by other things, or daydreaming.  Finding the balance between leaving her to get on with things at her own pace in her own time and encouraging her to focus and just get on with it is a tricky one.  One of the reasons for doing this English course is as preparation for doing a GCSE and clearly there will be time constraints when it comes to exams, so it is something that needs consideration.

M seems on the face of it to be settling in quite well at school now.  She is doing fine with the work, has joined the concert band and was picked to play in the U12 netball team for a tournament.  She's participating in various Christmas activities, playing her French horn with the band for a pensioners' party and also for the school play.  It only been about two months though and she is definitely still adjusting, understandably so.  We had a conversation recently when she told me that she wasn't sure whether she wanted to carry on with school after Christmas yet and that she wished she either loved school or hated it.  She feels that both options, carrying on or returning to home ed, would be 'wrong'.  I guess it's one of those life lessons that we all learn eventually; that the choices we make, especially the big ones, are very rarely 100% positive or negative.