Favorite Subjects.

I bet you thought I was going to write about the twins. They are usually my favorite subjects. Or Regina. No, I'm talking about my favorite subject in school. Homeschool, that is.

Math.

I don't remember it being my favorite subject when I was going through school, although I did get decent grades and managed to make it all the way through a statistics course in college. But somewhere along the last 12 years, it has become my favorite subject. I love teaching it to the younger kids, and I love re-learning it with the older kids.

Brian recently went through a few chapters in Algebra with the slope-intercept formula. That was all new to me. I must have daydreamed or dozed through it in Geometry class as a sophomore, but after a few tries I had it down even better than he did.

Now we are working with equations, and it's sort of pathetic how much I am enjoying myself. *There are 39 coins made up of pennies and dimes. The total value is $1.83. Write two equations, one for the number of coins, and one for the value. *Find three consecutive integers such that five times the first integer plus twice the second is equal to six times the third.

He worked in his book, I worked on the pink sheet. I won.

I love teaching/learning Latin, and grammar.

I love sharing my knowledge of Spanish with the kids, although we're doing Latin as our foreign language instead.

I love sharing classical music, poetry and art, and teaching them to draw.

Teaching them to read can be tedious, but I love the moment of discovery when they find they can actually READ.

I love learning history, though slogging through textbooks can be a drag.

I hate teaching spelling. Too tedious for me. I was one of those natural spellers, and I can't relate well to someone to whom it doesn't come as easily.

I love science, especially the higher sciences.

I love teaching the kids how to write in cursive. I'm neutral on teaching them how to print. I hate teaching them how to write compositions. This is probably because I'm so opinionated that if they're not writing the way I would do it, I sort of automatically think it's wrong.

I hate craft projects.

I love teaching them to touch-type.

I love showing them their way around a kitchen.

In general, I just love those "light-bulb" moments when I have found just the right way to explain something to them so that it makes perfect sense. I love when their enthusiasm for a subject finally measures up to my own.

Sometimes - quite often, actually - I get so discouraged with homeschooling that I just want to give up. Making this list has been therapeutic in that regard, reinforcing some of my reasons for wanting to homeschool in the first place.