Extracurricular

Samuel will be going to his classical school three days a week this year. When the time came to pick outside activities, we had the choices of Awana, children's choir at church, tennis clinic, swimming, and chess club. I don't want to overprogram him so he never has a chance for creative play, so I told him he could only do one activity on a school day and another, if he chose, on a non-school day. I don't know if this was the right thing to do or not, but it seemed right at the time.

If it had been me, I would have chosen choir and swimming. He chose Awana and chess! Of course I don't even know how to play chess, so I guess I'll have to purchase a chess set and learn the basics so he can play/practice at home.

Changing how we do things

The answer to this question is "yes", I am too dependent on my library's computer catalog. :-)

So, I guess I will do things the old fashioned way. Tomorrow I am actually going to visit the library with a list of books and try to find them in the stacks myself!

Here is my list of readers for the next three weeks (after school starts, he'll be reading school reading assignments and/or The Beginner's Bible):
Mouse Tales by Arnold Lobel
Floss by Kim Lewis
Blueberries for Sal by Robert McCloskey
The Magic Fish by Freya Littledale
Gregory's Shadow by Don Freeman

Here is my list of literature read-alouds (for starters, I'm only going to check one or two out at a time):
The Borrowers by Mary Norton
Henry Huggins by Beverly Cleary
Homer Price by Robert McCloskey
The Magician's Nephew by C.S. Lewis

For History, I recently purchase Story of the World, Volume 1 (Ancients) on eBay. I plan to read a chapter or two a week, along with checking out other books to go along with those chapters. I won't start this until I get the book and the library online catalog is up and running.

Math and printing will primarily follow the school's curriculum; however, I will always be offering real life uses of these two skills for practice and enrichment.

Later on in the school year, I will add math history, nature study, artist and composer studies.

Am I too dependent on my library's computer?

I had planned on starting to request books from my literature and history book lists for first grade and beginning to read from them next week. Currently we are on a child-led tour of African Animals, which is science and also kind of geography. But our literature choices this summer has been pretty much child-led (and mostly twaddle) and he hasn't been interested in history at all.

Now to the point of the post title. We had severe storms and flash flooding in our town on Tuesday. The Main branch of the library lost many books, as well as electrical and the computer server. Now, not only can I not order new books, I don't know when the books (mostly readers from Samuel's summer reading list) we have checked out are due and I can't renew them because it's all on the computer.

They say that the server may be up sometime the beginning of next week. I am trying to decide whether to return all my books "just in case" or risk a fine waiting until I can check on the computer. I still want to start Literature and History next week, so I will go into my branch on Monday and look for one or two of the titles on my list.