Well, my family and I are in our second year ever in an official homeschool co-op, and we've been homeschooling for 13.5 years, now. We've been on break from co-op classes for three weeks, basically. Last Friday was the sign-up day for next semester, which begins mid-January.

I have been teaching Jr. High Spanish and the High School Spanish 1 credit classes, both last year and this year. It has been a good challenge for me, as far as the regimentation, keeping up with the money usage, grades, and paperwork. This year, I implemented (along with the Spansih 2/3 teacher) a predominantly paperless system for homework! The students type up their homework, using keypad codes for all the accents and ñ's, and send their work to me via Word in e-mail. It has turned out great! I can get their graded work right back to them, and a couple of the students make corrections to bring up their grade and to better understand the material.

Since there are only ten weeks per session, the high school "for credit" classes have to keep going between semesters. This is tough for some, but not impossible. If the students are self-motivated and used to gleaning information on their own, they can succeed at this. Most of us (as high school credit-class teachers) try our best to be accessible for our students through e-mail and telephone. Many of us also plan one between semester study session to trouble shoot any problems and to present new concepts they will encounter before the new semester.

There is just too much infomation to wait until January to turn in five or six lessons to be graded, so we've got them on a pretty tight and productive schedule during these holidays. My kids will get two weeks off, both before and the week of Christmas.

I hostessed a study fiesta for my class today, and it went well! They are learning direct and indirect objects in Spanish sentence construction, as well as more uses of "tener"--to express hunger, thirst, etc. Soon, the students will learn "weather" expressions, seasons, the verb "gustar" among other things.

We are using Bob Jones Spanish. I am a CM homeschool mom who leads a CM bookclub that studies Charlotte Mason's writings.  My family and I have homeschooled from the very beginning, and our oldest is a senior this year. I never thought I would use a Bob Jones anything! LOL

It just happens to be a very, very thorough program, and works especially well in this group setting. Spanish was my minor in college and I've taught several different ways, with most age groups using so many different programs. One of my favorites for younger and middlers is now out of print :-( but I am very pleased with BJU for the high school classes.

It's been a busy week, but a blessed one. I'll write more later.

I definitely keep up with my posts on blogger better than I do here, but I will try to be more consistent at hsblogger!