I turned in all the paperwork to the superintendent of Elliott's school last week. Some days Elliott is really excited about homeschooling and other days he says he wants to continue to go to public school. My husband and I have been praying and talking about it for months now, though, and we really feel like it's what is best for our family. We want Elliott to be happy with his schooling where ever he goes, but ultimately as his parents, the decision is ours.
I'm pretty nervous about doing it myself. I guess it's because it's something new and exciting. I know Elliott is going to miss out on some fun stuff, but there are so many more fun things that we can do that we couldn't do while he was in public school. We have some really fun lessons and field trips planned. I know that we could always still do fun stuff during the summer, like we already do, but there's something to be said for traveling during the school year when crowds are smaller and prices are cheaper. :)
I just finished ordering the last of our homeschool stuff, I think. We will probably end up adding some more supplements if we need them to fill the time, but all the basics are covered now. We've run a couple of trial days to figure out about how long we will be working on each subject. It looks like in order to hit the mandatory hours each day, we will end up supplementing a fair amount. We are planning on doing a lot of that as unit studies, though, and hitting a lot of different subjects in the course of the study. We are starting with an outer space unit study, and it will obviously cover a lot of science and reading, but it will include math, art and social studies as well, to a smaller degree.
Elliott's last day of public school (for a while anyway, he might end up going back down the road) is next Thursday. I can't wait to begin the next chapter! I think we will do a little in June, but start actually keeping track and officially schooling in July.
4 comments:
What a big step this is Carla, but then again it isn't. You've always been very involved in Elliott's schooling at home, and I imagine that he is going to enjoy working more in depth on topics that interests him.
I am so thankful for our school's gifted program, where they have the same curriculum as the regular 2nd grade classes, but they go more in depth with everything. Another great thing about it is that they let the kids work at their own pace, and they encourage the kids to dig deeper into their interests.
It sounds to me as if, this is what Elliott needs, and I know that this is what you can give him.
I cannot wait to follow the two (three) of you on this journey, and I sure hope you will blog about your experience.
Elliott's school doesn't have a gifted program, so we have just been working on stuff at home. But that just takes up too much time. He leaves for school at 735 and gets home at 405. By the time we cook dinner, he gets a bath, and we read together that doesn't leave much extra time for anything. So we haven't had the time to do many of the things we would have liked to have done when he was learning about different things at school.
I think what he is most excited about is learning Spanish. We've worked on it a little bit, but we just haven't had enough time to do anything with it lately, between school and sports.
I'm so excited that during the same amount of time that he spends at school, we will be able to cover so many things. He spends so much time right now sitting around waiting for everyone else to finish. And a lot of the lessons are things he doesn't even need anyway, because he already knows it long before they are done talking about it.
He will have more time to do stuff outside of school that he wants to do, too. We are currently looking for a guitar teacher, and he wants to sign up for martial arts as well. Those are things that we just didn't have time for before, because we wanted to be able to spend time together as a family while Elliott wasn't at school.
Having just one child means we can spend so much more time doing things he wants to do as well. As long as we cover everything it doesn't matter if we spend 3 weeks on tornadoes and only 2 days on magnets. :)
How exciting! I think Elliot will thrive with the homeschooling option. Like JRFrugalMom says, you have always been a huge supporter of his schooling to begin with, so I am sure the transition is going to be a lot easier than you think. Good luck!
So hoping this goes just the way you want it to go. I love that you're following your instinct to do what's best. I bet it's going to have some great unexpected elements of fun in it too!
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