We're Back! (homeschool edition)

 Obviously, I decided to get back to blogging too. I'm not a YouTuber, although I did find some helpful YouTube videos to round out our homeschool curriculum choices for the upcoming school year. 

We entered the public school system for the first time during my oldest son's first year of middle school. The 2021-2022 school year was a transition for all of us, and for the world. We couldn't meet our oldest son's social needs from home anymore, because the shut downs had ended pretty much all of our fun homeschool activities. 

He finished 6th and 7th grade at a charter school, and the experience had lots of ups and downs. We had the usual bullying, the dump into the deep end of secular values, the commute, trying to pack lunches he would eat. 

Our 3rd son completed Kindergarten during the 2022-2023 school year. We knew we wanted to homeschool him for 2023-2024 for various issues related to the school. During his first homeschool year, we planned to focus primarily on him, but ended up adding two more students to our homeschool! We still managed to get him a diagnosis. He is officially twice exceptional (gifted and special needs) so we plan to homeschool him for quite some time. 

At the beginning of our oldest son's 8th grade year, many of the issues he experienced in school had hit his limit. He asked to come home. After verifying his main reason for wanting to come home (being punished with an indefinite lunch detention due to a partner project while also not being allowed to work with the partner because the partner had other work not completed), we determined to add him to our homeschool. We had additional concerns that we brought up to the school during the withdrawal process, and the school was very unresponsive. 

During this time, our second son started to experience some unusual health issues, primarily at school. Looking back, these issues had probably started around January of 2023. But by the time school started, his physical health was deteriorating. We looked into private schools and classical conversations, and saw the same physical symptoms. He asked to come home as well. We initially struggled with that decision, because he and I had the most issues with our relationship while homeschooling. It's hard to be a parent and teacher at times! In the end, we felt that he needed to be home, and added him to our homeschool in October. 

So we went from 0 homeschoolers to 3 in a few short months! We ended up using MiAcademy, because that was something that our twice exceptional kid was already using a few times a week, and it was an easy, "no planning" option for me. Of course, there was plenty of "work" for me to do on a daily and weekly basis, but it took some of the pressure off. 

Our oldest is starting at our local public high school in August. I have peace with that decision and know that I can always bring him home if needed. I'm taking time to plan for our rising middle schooler and our twice exceptional 2nd (ish) grader and thought I would take the time to post about our 2024-2025 school year here!

6th Grade - 

Our focus for 6th grade is to develop good habits. We are going back to a Charlotte Mason style book approach. He will read assignments weekly, work independently on his math skills, and take notes or provide narrations to show what he has learned. Some of our curriculum (and cost) includes:

History and Literature combined:

Story of the World, volume 2 (we chose this volume, because he learned Ancient world history in his previous curriculum last year)

Cost: Free (our library has several copies, and I plan to sign up for a free trial of audible to get the audiobook version as well). 

Living Book readings to go along with Story of the World (mainly from the library or Internet Archive). Someone else already did the work for me, so our plan is to loosely use this book list (James will read the books independently and narrate or summarize). You Tube Link

Cost: Free.

Math: 

Art of Problem Solving Pre-Algebra. 

Cost: $70 textbook and solutions (currently the price is cheaper)

Grammar & Writing:

Online seems to work better for him for this, Our current programs for him are Night Zookeeper (once a week) and Education.com

Cost: $70 for annual price on Night Zookeeper (sale) and $60 for Education.com (sale)

Science:

Middle School Chemisty. This is our big cost this year. I signed him up for a science class through a local homeschool group. He does need some social time, and science is not his preferred interest. For my older and younger sons, they both love science, so I have never really needed to do much other than buy good textbooks. 

Cost: $545


We have a few other plans to finalize, but I'm starting to get excited! The next thing to do is try to start setting up some organization and systems to help organize the process for Pre-K, 2nd, and 6th grade. 



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Internet Addiction

Image
The Internet can be a scary place nowadays. It's becoming both commonplace and embarrassing to admit when we have an Internet addiction. I've been working on my sugar addiction first, and I have an easily addictive personality. I also "have" to be on the computer for several of my jobs, often during times when I'm just sitting around waiting for a tutoring student. So, when those times happen, I can often get sucked into the maelstrom of Facebook feeds rather than working on my blog or continuing to write my story. So, what do I do about it? This one is a bit trickier, because, as mentioned, I often do "need" to be on the computer for my work, so I can't exactly go cold turkey. Also, the Internet has some amazing places to visit (Facebook groups that have tons of people using the same curriculum I am and sharing their awesome ideas, buy/sell/trade groups, because obviously I need to buy next year's curriculum today, and blogs!). My solution f
Read more

Imagination

Image
I've been thinking lately about my oldest son's imagination. He will turn 5 in August this summer. He would technically start Kindergarten in the fall. He's been in a year and a half of preschool when we lived in Louisville, KY. He also has had a younger brother for 2 years. He is just now starting to verbalize his pretend play, and he hasn't been "in school" for over 4 months. I wonder sometimes if our "school" environments do the opposite of what we want them to do. Around here, there are a few people who take their preschool very seriously. You have to prepare these kids for Kindergarten. They have to write and test and read and do multiplication by age 6. But what about creativity and musicality and imagination? We have special STEM schools (science, technology, engineering and math). But what if all they really needed were Lego's and Minecraft? We have Early College programs, but what if what we really need is getting back to a true Ki
Read more

January Babies

As I come to the final few weeks of pregnancy with our third child (a third boy of course), I have been wondering about those people who hope to have the "first baby of the year". I was a bit disappointed not to have a December baby (obviously, I hope he bakes long enough to be healthy) when I ended up in the hospital shortly after Christmas and thought about all the benefits of having a baby in December rather than January. He was pretty close to being fully cooked, so he probably could have avoided a long stay in the hospital, so I thought about all the benefits and drawbacks of December versus January babies.
Read more