Nicholas has finished his third grade math and decided to jump directly into fourth grade maths :\ He initially had planned to do another math book while his brothers did theirs, but when I pulled out the 4th grade book to make sure I had everything ready for August, he jumped on it and won't let go. I think he's jazzed at the idea of being WAY ahead of his brothers and lording that over them for all eternity. I am not discouraging him ;)

Jonathan is about 25 lessons away from finishing his maths (he got behind whilst visiting grandma over winter), and Benjamen has about a dozen lessons left to finish. I anxiously await their decision when they finish. It will be interesting to see whether Nicholas exerts any peer pressure on them to "get ahead" or whether they'll take the time off until August.

Time off is relative of course. We have loads of things to take the place of math work :) The current plan for July (and maybe part of June) is to thoroughly gear up for the release of the last Harry Potter installment on July 15. Benjamen asked for the 6th book on CD for his birthday (yesterday), and we already have the previous 5 on CD, as well as all of the released videos. We'll listen to the books, and read them on our own, and I plan to incorporate the spells (which are all in Latin) into our lessons. We'll try to translate them all accurately and add them to our Latin vocabulary (though I think the boys all know lots of the spells already and what they mean). We'll also brush up on our mythology by tracing those allusions as they crop up in the books. Benjamen's our current mythology expert, with Jonathan coming in a close second (mostly because his interest has waned, I think; Lovecraft is now his all-encompassing obsession), so B can spot any I might miss and give us the background. I'm looking forward to it and I think we'll all have fun with it. Even Jonathan, though he may be loathe to admit that anything I've thought of could possibly be fun ;)

The boys are all doing well. I'm working on spelling with Nicholas, which seems to be his one soft spot. I think more reading time will fix it naturally, but I'm also giving his spelling lessons special time and focus. I don't worry about it. He's made loads of progress since we've been working on it. We hit the library often so he has focused reading time, and I try to remember to keep up "reading hour" at home, too, in addition to the story time reading where I read aloud. We just finished one of the Moomintroll books, which was a popular choice. Very silly stuff. After storytime, they write a bit in their journal about the chapter we've read and I correct their grammar/spelling/handwriting/whatever. They seem to enjoy the whole process (B & N, J is exempt from the demeaning, humiliating, babyish story time ;P )

Jonathan's weak spot is writing, due entirely to lack of interest and a little bit of fear, I think. We've gotten to the point where he's writing daily, but without interest. He writes every night in his personal journal, as well, and has been for years, unasked, though I don't read that so I can't speak to the quality of that writing ;P I think it's a phase, and I think it will pass. He's very much in disinterested, apathetic teenager mode right now, across all subjects and in most areas of life in general, though he particularly balks at writing.

Benjamen's weak spot it grammar. As with Nicholas, I think reading will go a long way towards his absorbing more of the rules of grammar, but I'm also working with him in a focused way, daily, on understanding and consistently using the rules that he does understand. I think he may be overwhelmed by the quantity of mistakes that he's making, so I'm having him write one sentence at a time and we go over them individually. If I correct a paragraph, he gets disheartened by the number of mistakes, even when it's really just the same few mistakes made multiple times. I think I also need to separate grammar practice from handwriting practice for the same reason. I've generally been correcting handwriting mistakes in every lesson, and asking them all to practice writing neatly for every lesson, but Benjamen, in particular, gets overwhelmed by too much correction, so I think I'll shift tracks a bit with him.

With all three boys doing so many different lessons, I've been losing track of who has done what from day to day, so I've started keeping a simple check-list for each boy and encouraging them to go through their own cycle of lessons, which they pick, depending on what they feel like doing at any given time, so that we hit everything once before we cycle through again. It's helped me notice what they enjoy doing, what they don't mind doing, and what they procrastinate with. And it's not static, it generally depends on their mood, though it seems they each have a particular lesson that they enjoy the least. Benjamen almost always leaves spelling for last, even though he's quite good at it. He had a few lessons (on apostrophe words for instance) where he stumbled quite a bit, and he still hasn't shaken that off, I think. Nicholas leaves science for last, and I think that has to do with the nature of the lessons we chose for this year. They're challenging and writing-intensive, and he has to do a bit of thinking, so he generally leaves those for last. Jonathan, of course, generally leaves writing for last, but not always. Noticing these patterns has been an interesting side-effect of keeping better track of things.

We've had loads of workbooks this year, many of them hand-me-downs collected from friends over the years, sort of as an experiment on my part, to see how they boys would do. They've not had any problems doing the work, but I do think it bores them. They've been exposed to things they might not otherwise have been exposed to, and I do like that, but I think the boredom outweighs any novelty benefits. I don't think I'll be doing any more workbook-type lessons in the future. As I suspected, they all seem to thrive more when we follow their natural interests and find "real" source books to learn from, rather than workbooks and curricula. A good example emerged from a recent trip to the bookstore. I was looking at the middle school and high school science texts, and not finding anything that I thought might interest him. So I went over to the adult science section and immediately saw lots of books that I thought he would enjoy. I called him over and he chose The Elegant Universe (about string theory), the Quadrivium (about number, geometry, music, and astronomy), and a host of other books from the same publisher on evolution, coincidence, alchemy, and the like. He's been chatting me up ever since about all of the cool little tidbits of information he's picking up from them.

That's what works for my kids, when they become naturally interested in something, are allowed to make a choice about what they want to do/read to pursue that interest, and then find cool/fun/amazing sources of information on whatever the topic happens to be. I can encourage them to learn about this or that science topic all day, and I can even cajole them into doing it, but when they choose, they inevitably choose wisely for themselves, and the kind of real learning they do when that happens is leaps and bounds above what they accomplish when they have no intrinsic interest in the subject.