Today is the 14th day of our official homeschooling. Yay! So far so good. I have decided to mark this day as the first day of our blog spot. I am super excited about helping my children along their journey in a more hands on manner. I must admit that sending my children off to school never actually made me happy mother. However, this is not the reason that I choose to home school them.
My children have found it to be extremely difficult keeping up with their peers. My oldest child has had intense resource since Pre-K and has been held back a grade and is still far behind. My second child is a struggling reader and is falling behind further and further everyday. The first child (The Social Butterfly) is very tenacious and keeps going head strong despite the test scores, while my second child (The Timid Mouse) is severely discouraged and had to be dragged to school for the past two years. Both my Butterfly and Mouse struggle with different levels of Dyslexia and other medical problems as well. Their intelligence levels are beyond their peers, yet it does not transfer over to paper and tests. In a formal school setting the tests measure their success. A change had to be made.
My husband and I decided, after many years of off and on discussions, that the time had come to take direction over our children's educations. It was a very short and simple discussion. We have a lot of faith that we our making the best decision for them at this time in their lives. Having no desire to over think the process, we began immediately. We have not picked out a curriculum and do not have a structured schedule to learn things. Right now we are taking it slowly and that's just fine because it's our goal. I have enjoyed spending the past two weeks mostly exploring the depths of my children's current knowledge base. This is our assessment time period and to do this I have utilized Khan Academy for Math and The Reading Kingdom for Reading. My children love both sites but they favor Khan because it is math and their math skills are more developed. What they enjoy the most is sitting down in front of the chalkboard while I ask questions and write. The one thing that they are learning about that they find to be the most fun is American Sign Language. Next week we will also begin working in SRA 2.0 Lab through McGraw-Hill online. As always I am excited to try something new and see if it fits them individually. We will keep posted.
