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Friday, January 05, 2007

Homeschooling Jump

My husband and I took the homeschooling jump this week and took our oldest son out of the public school system. Our two oldest daughters are still in public school. Our son just needed some time at home were there are less distractions. He is very bright and rather ADD and works very well one on one.
We had fun today working out our schedule and starting in on our "class work".
I have searched the Internet for months, trying to find information on homeschooling and curriculum and have been very frustrated. I have a degree in early childhood and elementary education (don't ever look at my spelling though) so I have never doubted my teaching ability. I just don't trust my self discipline to keep up with a program.
In searching the web I found it frustrating that I couldn't find what I wanted. The curriculum's were either incredibly expensive or so far off the deep end that there wasn't much usable info in them. I know there must be good programs out there but they really are hard to find and you have to take their word for it. I also found that the religious based curriculum, while doing a pretty good job of teaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the children, they were very soft on other subject matter. I already work on teaching my children the Gospel, I want help in teaching math, reading, social studies, and science.
I got some good advice from my mom. She told me to go talk to the principal so I did. I am so glad that I did. I called her in advance and let her know what my plan was and that I wanted to come in and talk to her. That gave her time to collect her ideas and be prepared to give me ideas. When I got there, she had gathered all of my son's text books together and and gone into her own resources and found some others that are really fantastic. She let me check these out for the remainder of the year. She also let me know that he is welcome to come back to the school for special classes if we want to, such as art, PE, music, library and computers. He can also attend the after school program which is a lot of fun.
I felt so much better about things after talking to her. I am a little ADD myself and get overwhelmed when faced with too many things to think about and decide all at once. Now I have a plan that we can follow and can deviate from without upsetting the apple cart. He can work on special projects as the mood strikes which is something you need to be able to do with and ADD child. They have an incredible ability to hyper-focus on things that interest them which is to your advantage if you can direct it and help them harness that drive.
We are so excited. He has already found a pet project. I will have to post more about that as it develops. I might have to let him create his own Homeschooling Blog about his adventures and his conservationist projects.
I hope I am not just typing this to fill space out there in cyberspace and that someone can actually get some ideas from this. I started the week feeling good about this decision but very stressed. Now I feel good about the decision and very excited about the plan that we have to accomplish it. I think the whole having a plan thing is what is going to help me.
This homeschooling thing is forcing me to organize a few pockets of my chaos that I call a life and home.
One of my son's great comments today was that now he gets an afternoon recess EVERY day. The poor kid has been missing them for several years because he had detention for behavior (talks way too much) or because he hadn't finished is work (couldn't stand another worksheet).
Well that was long but it has been an eternity of a week here at our house.
I am excited to be looking at the start of a new week soon with so many new projects to get into.

1 comment:

It's Me, Michele! said...

Way to go ... Way back when my boys were in elementary school, we homeschooled them due to "issues" as well!!!

They all have attended college, with individual success! One will be graduating in the Fall of '07 !

Stick with it -- be flexible and let your son guide his learning....

All is well, trust yourselves!
Boisegirl :)

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