Well, as of tomorrow we will have completed yet another first week of school.  It has been the worst first week I think I've ever had--definitely a reason to hope that the Lord will so be in this year that amazing things will happen.  I don't feel near as prepared as I planned to be, or as I usually am.  But we have gotten through it anyway, and I'm sure everything will work out.  

My general goal for this year is to really work on spiritual development, character issues, and training in helping more around the house, but it seems those are always my main goals and always the first things to get dropped in favor of academic work.  I also have specific goals for each boy.

Josh:  Josh will be taking some FL Virtual School classes, in hopes that he will have to be a little more responsible for his work and less accountable to me.  He has already started Keyboarding and has an A right now.  He would love to drop it, but I won't let him.  Next week he starts Language Arts.  I will be supplementing that with some additional spelling, grammar, and reading work.  He is trying to finish Math-U-See Fractions (sorry, I can't ever remember those Greek letters!), and will move on to decimals and percents this year.  Maybe we'll even get to Pre-Algebra!  He is starting Latin this year too.  Yeah, he's real thrilled.

Stephen:  Stephen is finishing up MUS Gamma (hey! I remember that one!  It's multiplication), then he'll start Division.  He's doing Dr. Aardsma's spelling and math drills for drill work, and English for the Thoughtful Child 2 for Grammar and writing.  He is most thrilled that we will be studying Chemistry this year, since he's had a bug for it for over a year now.  We will do this together with Josh, as well as finish Greenleaf's Reformation sketches and The Story or the World, Early Modern History. 

Andrew: My goal for Andrew is to make lots of progress through The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading.  I'm hoping to have him most of the way through it, but as we have started back to it, he seems to be having a hard time again, so I'm going to go slowly at first.  Hopefully he will pick up speed like he did last year.  Besides reading, I want him to get through MUS Primer and Alpha, and maybe get into Beta.  His "fun" science and history will just be reading about things together.  I'm not sure he's even ready for what we will be doing with the older boys--certainly not the Chemistry!  I'm especially excited to go through Discovering Jesus in Genesis with him.  I have wanted to read that with one of my kids since it first came out.

I'm not sure what other activities we will be doing this year.  I'm pretty committed to Scouts, but PE and the co-op we did last year at our church are maybe's this year.  I will just have to see.  PE will require the kids to be in three different classes at three different hours, and I just don't know if we can handle that!  Plus most of our closest friends from last year aren't returning this year. So, we'll just have to wait and see about it.

I'll post pictures from our first week on my Living Amidst Boys blog.  Just use the sidebar to go to it--I'm too tired to mess with the html for connecting you tonight!