Time flies when you are having fun. Indeed, it applies to us this school year. Some days fun eludes us, but, overall, we can say with certainty this year has turned out better than the last.

Ijams trails

Just last week, my son exclaimed, “I love this new way of doing math!” He was referring to how we skip around the page, not doing every single problem in the chapter. I observe him solve the first few exercises to make sure he got the concept, and then I assign certain problems or exercises as I see fit.

Boys talking on a trail

Picnic in the hut

Some of the kids in our group

This way, he finishes four pages of math a day. That’s 16 pages a week, because we only learn from books on four days of the week. Before, when we did “school” five days a week, we could barely finish 2-3 pages of math a day. That’s a total of 15 pages at best – even less than what we do now.

And because there is less math to do, they want more of it. Several times, they have asked me if they could do one more exercise “because it is fun.” Now, that’s something new!

In Other News

For our Wild+Free hike, as you have seen from the pictures above, we went to Ijams Nature Center in Knoxville, TN. As a family, we have been there before. But the hiking trails we took with Wild+Free this week were new to us. They have many paths over there.

We always bring a picnic lunch. Our group sat around the play area for lunch. The moms talked and the kids played. Bliss.

The most important lesson this week has been that the kids do focus better with less screen time, so guess what? We took it all away from them Monday-Friday. Ha! They did not see that coming, but they took it well. Life throws you curveballs and forks in the road and this is one of those. They accepted it.

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