Our homeschooling end-of-year evaluation is coming up in a few weeks (our evaluator gets out of school on June 10th, I think) and I'm looking forward to the experience now that it's getting so close.

Over the next few weeks, J and I will be pulling out a few examples of his work from the various subject notebooks we've been compiling throughout the year and putting them together for our final portfolio. I think it will be a fun process for him, revisiting the year and looking at how much we've learned together.

We've just transitioned from human anatomy to botany in our science studies. We've been gardening since March, so we've been at it quite a while, but we didn't finish up with the human body until Friday, so yesterday was our official start of plant study. J spent the morning flipping through Green Thumbs and then we followed a recipe for vegetable soup from the book for our lunch.

For history, we've finished the Romans and are looking at the Aryans of India this week. We get to study the Buddha! I got scads of books from the library on the Ganges, the Buddha, and India in general, and J is devouring them whole.

We're reading the Tales of Despereaux at night, which is awfully sweet, and we're alternating that with Watership Down, ever since we got Blackberry, our Jersey Wooly. J loves the glossary in the back of the book that contains rabbit/english translations. He's been reading alot of Judy Blume on his own, as well.

We're doing Singapore math exclusively, now, and it's going much better than our attempts with Saxon. J doesn't complain (well, rarely) and he finishes them so much faster, so it's not such a long, drawn-out process for him. He's adding three three-digit numbers at the moment.

We do music and art once a week, formally, and all of the boys do some sort of art and music, informally, almost every day, on their own.

B has been incorporating lots of letters into his drawings, which is cool to see. B and I have all but dropped the formal math and reading instruction he was insisting on (he brings me one or the other of the books maybe once every other week) and since then, he's been advancing in leaps and bounds. He still loves doing work books, though, and I sometimes replentish his supply as a treat to him. Workbooks as special treats. Bizarre.

We're also putting together a book about the months of the year as part of his grammar/writing practice. Yesterday he decorated a cover for the book and wrote out the title and author information for the first page. He also wrote, "Published by Jonathan Peter" on the front, which gave me a chuckle. He loves putting books together and over the years has written too many to count. Sometimes he writes a dedication inside and humbly presents them to DH and I, "To my loving mother and father." He's very dramatic. And very sweet.

These next few weeks before the review, we're also going to be brushing up on all of the poems he's memorized this year. We started looking at them again a few days ago and I was amazed that he remembered perfectly some of the poems that we hadn't reviewed since last fall. I really need to figure out how to bottle his retention and heal myself with it.

I don't think there will be any problems with the review, but I do hope I can talk her into doing less record-keeping for next year. I think J and I will both be more relaxed if I don't feel that I have to keep such detailed records of what we're doing. I'm flirting with the idea of giving her access to this blog so that she can check in on us throughout the year. That would make record-keeping infinitely less stressful. I could just pop in here every once in a while and write up a summary of what we've been up to. Voila! Painless record-keeping.