Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘School’ Category

James left Belmont in June and was to be starting in Strandtown next week with John following two years later which was shaping up to be a logistical nightmare for us for the next few years.

We decided a while back that it was going to be better for them both to be in the same school so had looked into a few options over the last four or five months. However, by the time we’d made our final decision the schools were all closed for the summer so we couldn’t do anything about it ’til earlier this week.

Surprisingly, it turned out to be very easy to change schools. We’d expected some major inquisition, loads of forms and lots of “why?, do you really want to do this?” etc. but in fact it turned out to be basically “OK, no problem”.

Funnily enough it’s the school that was originally towards the top of our list of candidates and the school that my Mum (who we think is somewhere in the photo) started in the year it was built.

Kumon has a “praise at every opportunity” philosophy so over the early part of the year we were running at a couple of certificates per month for most months.

With the summer and the extra subject for each of the little guys that pace has slowed somewhat as they’re going through the same number of sheets for both subjects together as they’d been doing for one subject before. Thus, we’ve now reached the point where we’ll have a little flurry of certificates over the next month or so followed by nothing until around Christmas.

Our original theory was that as they were on holiday they’d be able to do more of the Kumon work but it didn’t pan out like that as they were if anything even more tired after a day of holiday activity than after a day of school activity. With school starting soon we’re not sure what to do re doing both subjects so are initially considering September a trial month before we make our minds up.

Way back in May we had the idea of giving the Kumon a bit of a boost over the summer months. After all, the kids wouldn’t be tired after a day at school and we’d have more time to fit in the work. So, we added the other subject for each of them. Thus, James started maths and John started English.

What we hadn’t allowed for was that although they’d not be at school all day, they’d be tired out from doing holiday things. So rather than plugging away with ten pages of each subject they’ve mostly been doing five of each with perhaps a few weeks at the full rate on one of the subjects.

Despite that slower pace, both of them have made quite a bit of progress over the summer months. John is still ploughing on with 100% marks on his maths and, after a slow start, has just about completed a level in the English. James has continued to pick up speed on the English and is getting into the swing of the maths too.

Now we have the problem as to what to do when they restart school. We could continue on with both subjects but somehow I don’t think that’ll work too well when they’ve school homeworks to contend with as well. What we’re going to do is to continue on into September and see how it goes before deciding what to do over the remainder of the school year.