First and foremost, we will not be leaving it. :) I have seen so many positive changes in both of my kids already so that tells me the was one of the best decisions we have ever made for our kids.
When we first decided to take on home schooling I was scared. I wasn't sure I would have the discipline to do it every day as much as needed to be done. So we decided to use an online public school program, the fact that it was a free program made it even ore possible to start sooner. So we thought it was going to be perfect.
The first day was scary, up until the morning before we logged in we had no idea what to expect. Partly because the school did a poor job of explaining to us how things were going to work.
We spent most of the day listening to teacher after teacher telling us the same things over ad over. And I learned that listening to a faceless person talk all day long was completely boring.
But once things started rolling school work wise we all started feeling overwhelmed very quickly. The kids were working their very best, as far as I could tell, but they were not able to finish everything in a day. We were working from morning until far after dinner and still not getting everything done that was on their agenda for the day. We were all feeling very defeated. There were many times I had to walk outside to hide my frustration and to keep from crying.
I started researching online and talking to people in our home school group about other options.
Finally after just 3 weeks of this I talked to my husband about it and we decided to quit, cold turkey. We gave notice and began winging it. Last week was our first week and it was amazing. We had fun, we learned more about each other already, we got so much done!
Here is how we are doing things for now.
We started out with the basics.
Math, Science and Reading/Language Arts are most important so I knew we should start there.
Week One Independent:
Started off the day with a writing prompt that I found on various internet sites. I just let the kids free write which is one of their favorite things to do. This gave me time to settle into my day and I knew my kids would love this because it is one of heir favorite things to do.
We also read from our favorite books just for fun, with no agenda.
For math we found a free program on KhanAcademy.org It started out with a pretest and takes the info from that test to cater a program just for that individual and begins teaching one lesson at a time. You have to get 5 problems right in a row in order to move on to the next lesson. I actually have an account as well and whenever they do their lessons I do mine to brush up on my own skills. ;)
For English/Language Arts we are using a website with another free program called FreeWorldU.org It's a flashcard system that teaches almost everything in every grade level, they also have math and science and even lessons on manners and internet etiquette! As well as training for medical school! LOL With this program is where we have the most fun learning, so far. We have learned a lot about what each of us knows by trying to guess the answers before looking at the "other side of the cards"
For science we have been doing science experiments from various sites and kits I have been collecting. And on other days I watch a TV show from the science channel the night before and write questions and quiz them on what they learned after watching it the next day. Then we look up more information on each topic afterward if we have any questions.
For their "electives" we are planning to create some sort of art program to follow for my daughter and Levi is continuing to attend his previous Jr High school for his guitar education.
Oh and we have a World history curriculum that was shared with us with is a Christian Curriculum that focuses on God throughout the lesson.
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