I'm so Proud!

Clark and Bethany took their first standardized test today. How exciting for the whole family! Abe and I were practically giddy giving them advice. You see, we have only ever homeschooled, and why would we have had any need for a standardized test? But we have enrolled Clark and Bethany in a school. WHAT???

Those of you opposed to homeschool will be cheering and thinking-- thank goodness that crazy Betsy has finally seen the light. I knew that homeschooling thing would be too much for her. Now maybe her house will be clean, her kids' faces will not be crusty, their hair will be combed, and she won't have piles of laundry higher than her bed.

Sorry to disappoint. We are still very much homeschooling, but this ONLINE school utilizes the K12 curriculum, but is extremely flexible as to how many courses can be taken , at what level, and how quickly they need to be completed. As in, there is no time limit. Clark is taking a science course, we're all doing a history class together, and Grandpa Cannon is leading us through a Spanish course. We do have access to some pretty cool field trips.

One of the very few requirements is that 3rd, 5th, and 8th graders take the IOWA standardized tests. Lucky us-- we have a 3rd and a 5th grader. Yesterday I printed off a bubble sheet for each of the them and we did a 3rd grade practice test. As I suspected I found there were some areas we have really focused on and the kids breezed through. And then there was punctuation!

Note to self: Focus on punctuation.

Clark does very well in math, but the curriculum we use does fractions a little later than the public schools, so that might have been a bit of a problem. He said he was the best in science. I'm sure he was.

Here's the kicker. When I picked them up after three hours of testing Bethany said, "That was actually pretty fun!" Poor unsocialized homeschoolers-- they don't even know they are supposed to hate it! They were so happy that that's ALL they had to do for school today. Yikes, I must be some kind of slave driver if they'd rather take three hours of standardized tests than do their schoolwork at home.

In other news, Elinor had her first soccer game on Monday. Umm, I will withhold public judgment until the end of the season, but I will say this - she sure doesn't feel the need to follow the crowd. Which is usually a good thing.

Unless you are in soccer. In soccer the crowd is all going after the ball and if you're not going after it too, you aren't too much use to the team. Their was some grass picking and quite a bit of flitting about. At one point she came out of the game and I said, "You should go after the ball".
She responded, "Well, MOM-- the ball never comes to me!"

Clark is involved with flag football for the first time. He's anxious to do tackle football, and he's definitely built for it, but tackle is a huge- huge--crazy huge-- time commitment and none of us are ready for that yet. He had his first game last night and he LOVED it.

Bethany is very involved with dance and she dances for a couple of hours twice a week. She does ballet, jazz and tap. She'd love to do hip-hop and tumbling as well, but we must pace ourselves.