Sunday, September 28, 2008

Am I doing enough?

As an unschooler wanna be I constantly second guess myself. Am I doing enough? My oldest has been sick for 2 days so we've done nothing but try and recover from sleepless puke and cry and shivering and everyone awake nights.....I digress. 2 things happened today that have made me feel well both above that and below and nervous. Weird descriptions I know, never was great with words. First thing - I'm on a NING networking ring of homeschoolers who recommended mindsprinting.com for math tutoring. I went and did it with my two son's it was more a test of how the kids could answer multiple choiced questions properly than anything...but there are some holes in their knowledge. Important holes? Hmmmm lets see: great than less than, I explained to August it's just a way of explaining what number was bigger and he could immediately tell me which number is bigger. So does he need to know the sign? He understands the concept the first time I explain it to him. Ok and then the whole 3 tens and 4 ones thing, is that important? I've tried doing Miquon Math with him he doesn't like it much, it's too boring....he says....he gets numbers.....reading that I'm going to go and see if they have a placement test....
Sawyer's kindergarten placement test was pretty straightforward, but the worksheets I had to print out to work on his "weak" areas were silly. they wanted a match of the number sentence to the pictures and he kept giving me the answers.....so was he wrong?

Then my sister called and said "Sage said she doesn't want to go to this baby school anymore, but she wants to go to school with 12 year olds and do some real learning" My kids are so not like this. Her daughter is very precocious and scarily intense, bright, I'm searching for a description that matches, her thought processes have always been miles ahead of what a "normal" child her age would be. Sage is 4.

So should I sit down and do more math? more printing? more everything?

Should I trust that they will want to at some point?

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