(home)school begins

… though not at home, of course. Last year, we headed out to Wilderness at the Smokies to start up our year of homeschooling. It got us out of the distractions and demands of home and into a “neutral” place.

Again, this year, we decided to head out to a waterpark for the start of homeschooling (“home” seems to be an arbitrary name — “non”-institutional schooling, perhaps?). This year, though, we decided to go to Great Wolf Lodge in Concord, NC. What a great time we all had!

Not only was there a fantastic waterpark as part of the hotel, but MagiQuest is built right into the hotel. The girls ran around, completing all of the quests, while I sat in our nearby room getting lots of things done and relaxing by reading a book. I’ll have more to say about MagiQuest and Great Wolf in general later, but for now, I’ll just say we had a great time!

Homeschooling got off to a great start. Camille had actually done most of her Monday work in the car on Sunday, but tried out some new things. I felt that her study skill were lacking while watching the course on study skills, unfortunately. I had her start over and take note; she said that really helped her pay attention and not “zone out”. For Chloe, we realized that we can bring along many fewer books than we did; the next trip her bag will be a lot lighter. Most of Chloe’s coursework is the same as last year, but advanced by a grade level, so there was nothing too surprising. We have some additional work to do to get a few more subjects working smoothly, but it was a great start to our school.

chloe homeschooling - 15 aug 2011

camille homeschooling - 15 aug 2011