At the stroke of noon today, Ella and I finally finished her fourth grade home school year by reaching 900 instructional hours. This academic year was full of ups and downs, but overall we know that Ella has gained a lot of new knowledge and skills, despite her often defeatist attitude toward challenges and changes.
We learned about fractions and decimals, plant and animal cells, the Revolutionary War, factoring and factor pairs, unit conversions, the Middle Ages, poetry (including William Carlos Williams and Emily Dickinson), area and perimeter, Johann Sebastian Bach and Duke Ellington, budgets and menus, sound and light, baking banana bread with no help, forces and motion, planting a garden, plotting and reading points on a coordinate grid, long division and multiplication, the history and architecture of Hagia Sophia, as well as Gothic art and architecture.
We read so many books this year that I stopped keeping a list. We very much enjoyed the entire Little House series and topped off the year with Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing this month.
The highlight of this home school year were our 28 field trips, including the ones we took in each of the five main regions of our country which we explored though our social studies curriculum.
Many challenges remain in educating a child whose brain is affected by developmental trauma, but there are strengths emerging as well, such as a knack for geometry and a deep interest in social justice. While Ella will once again be home schooled in 2019/20, there are some changes on the horizon. More about those later. For now, we take a breath and relax.
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