Where's the Balance?

I bought the grade 5 achievement test from seton.com, and administered it to Jacob at home. I found it a perfect introduction into "fill in the dot, multiple-choice" type testing. I graded them before mailing them back for official results, and there were no surprises. This has been a very positive experience, and as his teacher, I appreciated affirmation of Jacob's academic strengths and weaknesses. He aced reading comprehension, but struggled with punctuation because I have stressed creative writing over grammar. I dug out my Easy Grammar and bought Editor In Chief, and will use those once or twice a week to improve his skills. His vocabulary is very good, but I bought the next Wordly Wise vocab book, since he enjoys his current book. Jacob has always been at least a year ahead in math, so aced the math concepts portion, but didn't finish the math computation in the allotted time. Instead of quickly figuring out the answers in his head, he was slowly and carefully numbering and showing all his work on his scrap paper. I didn't notice that until the end of his time, or I would have encouraged him to work out as many as possible in his head. THAT was a great learning experience for him! That was exactly why I decided to test him this year, in as relaxed atmosphere as possible--for the experience.

Each homeschool style is unique, and mine has changed over the years. I'm between the unschooler and the schedule-happy mom that re-creates school in the home. We do have a sort of schedule, I do have goals and I love books, but I try to find materials that are as interesting and child-friendly as possible. If teaching a subject is stressful to him or to me, something is wrong and I need to put it away until I can find a different approach.

I was worried that we were spending too little time at home with the books, because we go on so many field trips, he is in time-consuming classes such as band, art, musical drama and karate, and I teach piano three afternoons a week, but I feel much better after testing him, and just need to continue to keep an eye on that "balance". But isn't that what life's all about?