Diary of a Reluctant Homeschooler: Our First Day!

My big guy is in kindergarten!

This year we are participating in one of our state's online charter schools. Basically, it's a combination of public school and homeschool. The public school sends the materials and plans the curriculum and I teach him here at home along with some help from teachers over the computer.

The days leading up to this morning have been stressful. Poor Nick has been really stressed too, not knowing what to expect. He cried himself to sleep last night saying, "I don't want to be in kindergarten! I don't want to be anything when I grow up, so I don't have to learn!"  The school didn't send the information about his classes until after 9pm last night and he was required to be in an online class at 9am this morning. Eddie and I were up until after midnight gathering the materials for the lessons that appeared on his calendar on the school's website.

Then this morning the computer that the school sent for Nicholas wouldn't connect to the internet, even though we had double and triple checked everything last night. Luckily I got the Blackboard session to work on my laptop with two minutes to spare. It was chaotic talking to Eddie on the phone about how to solve the internet issue, Penny screaming, Nick chasing the dog, and Abby playing. I was not feeling so good about this decision.

In the Blackboard session the teachers introduced themselves and read a book to the students, then they dismissed the kids and I let Nick watch a movie with Abby while I sat through the rest of the orientation. The teachers told us not to worry about any lessons this week. So...we were up all night for nothing. Awesome.

I didn't want all that work to go to waste, so we did our Math and Language Arts lessons anyway. The teachers said the calendar was flexible, but I'd like to stick to it as much as possible on days when Nick is being cooperative, because I'm sure there will be plenty of days when we slack off a little.

I put Penny in her crib and let her cry for a few minutes while I did the math lesson with Nick. He really seemed to thrive with the one-on-one attention and we finished the entire lesson (pulling shapes out of a bag, identifying them, finding shapes around us, completing 3 workbook pages, and an online portion) in under 15 minutes. When I marked the lesson complete on the computer it gave us credit for 45 minutes. I could get used to that.

All together, it took us less than an hour and a half to do our online orientation, math, language arts (although I skipped Handwriting because he completed those lessons over the summer) and a calendar session that I've added on my own, but when I checked "lessons complete" on the computer, he got credit for 3 hours of school. I feel like that's cheating, but he did the work and he did it correctly, so I guess that's just one of the perks. Hopefully no truancy officers read my blog. :)

I like seeing areas of strength I didn't know he had. For example, I was pleasantly surprised when he reached into the bag of shapes and said, correctly, "That's a cylinder." (They were only looking for circle as an answer.) And I also like seeing areas of weakness. He is having trouble distinguishing a rectangle from a square, but other than that he was able to identify all of the shapes and their colors correctly. Go little dude!

The hardest part so far is writing his name, but as I've been working with him I've noticed some things I hadn't seen before. I had not realized that a lot of his slowness comes from perfectionist tendencies (which came as a great surprise to me because of the state of his room!). He will start to write a letter, not like way it looks, then keep writing the same letter over and over, all over the page until he writes one he likes. I always thought he was distracted because of the way his papers would look when they came home from preschool (incomplete with random letters all over them) but it's actually the opposite. He is concentrating so hard on writing the letters of his name correctly that he never had time to do any of the other work on the page.

I'm thinking about getting a stamp with his name on it so that he has time to concentrate on other work, then we will focus on his name separately until he has mastered it.     

We still have one phonics worksheet to do, but I'm letting him take a break right now. We stated at 8:30 and were finished by 10am. Now I feel a little better about this cyber school thing. :)