The School Year So Far: Naomi

We started our homeschooling journey for this year on August 1st, so have been toiling away for over 3 months now.  How is it going?  Welll, I meant to write one post about everyone but Naomi's update got long, so I'll just talk about her now.

Naomi (age 11):  Naomi is the quintessential student. She writes well, learns math rapidly, and is in every way a dream to teach. I am thankful our eldest learns easily and doesn't have the handwriting glitches of some of the younger children. It helped me have confidence as a homeschooling mom when she read early and picked up math concepts enthusiastically.  The fact that she can write easily and well made it possible for me to turn over some of her schoolwork at an early age.

So far this year, academics are going well for Naomi. She is charging through Fractions in MathUSee. She and Lydia are working on Cantering the Country and Story of the World with relatively little attention from me.  My job for both curricula is to copy pages and check out requisite books from the library.

One issue for Naomi, and it IS an issue, is that she and I both have to work to make sure that academics are not too simple for her.  Kevin and I might qualify as gifted students.  Certainly we both found public school not very challenging.  While that sounds nice, in actual fact a student who learns very easily can become lazy.  Naomi and I had a really good talk about that a couple of years ago.  I told her about how I was the best student in my high school class, one of the 3 best students in my undergraduate metallurgy classes, and was taken aback when I went to graduate school and met students who were smarter than I was!  I remember sitting around listening to some Indian and Chinese students chattering away about thermodynamics and feeling like I had strayed into another world and that my brain just didn't work well enough.  Fortunately, I had a long history of working very hard and so what I lacked in brains I made up with hard work, and I did fine in graduate school.   While I probably strayed towards being obsessive at times about school, I did at least learn to work hard.  That is my goal for all of our children, that they learn to work hard.

Another issue for Naomi, and indeed all the children, is that at times school is boring.  I was bored a lot in public school and I want to avoid that in general for the children.  But reality is, sometimes there will be boring material and the kids have to learn to buckle down and do the boring stuff.  So long as it isn't boring all the time, I think some boredom is a good thing.  Sometimes life isn't very exciting.  It is good to tolerate some degree of boredom in doing tasks that must be done.