Diary of a Reluctant Homeschooler: Week 1

Our first week of cyber school is over & I feel a little better.

I've learned a lot.

For one thing, if you call it cyber school instead of homeschool, traditional homeschoolers are much less likely to get mad at you. Who knew there was a whole other mommy war battle going on between those who chose to educate their kids at home via online charter schools and those who do it without those resources? I've gotten quite a few rude comments via Facebook & email about how other people's tax money is paying for my kid's education. Really? We're not accepting Welfare over here, we pay school taxes too. My personal stance on the issue is that if we are already paying for it, we might as well use it. Why wouldn't I use a "free" (again, my taxes paid for it just as much as anyone else's) award-winning, standards-based curriculum or computer?

Interestingly, the only negative feedback has come from traditional home schoolers. I get it (sort of), they've fought hard to keep the government out of their kids' education and they are cheesed that they have to pay for their own curriculum on top of the school taxes they have to pay. Sorry, guys. That's your choice, just like paying for tuition at a private school would be. I'm sticking with what I know, which is public school and how to teach it.

We also have quite a few friends who traditionally homeschool who have been very supportive, so that's help soften the blows quite a bit. Many of our friends who have enrolled in public schools have expressed an interest in cyber schooling after they saw the curriculum we received.    

Eddie and I have both been extremely impressed with Nicholas' progress and performance this week. We've completed all of the math and language arts lessons and he has demonstrated mastery on every task. There is no way  he would do that in a gen. ed. classroom. He even asked to do extra work last night when Eddie came home.

There is a lot of overlap in the subject areas, which is nice, I guess. They did identifying shapes and colors in math at the same time as color words in language arts, for example.

I like the language arts curriculum a lot, but in my opinion the math is too easy and the other subjects are WAY too hard.

Nicholas has a documented learning disability in math. He tested in the .04% range. He has only gotten one answer wrong this entire week. Either I'm the best teacher in the universe (which is entirely possible ;) or it's just too easy. That's awesome for us, but if your child is on or above grade level, I can't imagine using this math curriculum. However, I did see on the school's Facebook page that some of the kindergarteners are starting with first grade materials, so maybe that would be an option.

History is ridiculous. In the very first lesson we had to learn about the earth, then all of the continents, attributes of each continent,  as well as complete a paper that detailed famous structures that were located on the various continents like the Great Wall of China, the Great Barrier Reef, the Grand Canyon, etc. That was ONE lesson. In Kindergarten. Sheesh. Luckily, we only have to do history twice a week.

Also, history is different than social studies in this curriculum, so on that same day we had a completely separate lesson about the Pledge of Allegiance.  

Art was equally as intense. We were observing the features of an oil painting of Henry VI as a child, then comparing and contrasting it to a sculpture of a cowboy riding a horse. In order to do that, first the lesson took us through the various aspects of a realistic portrait, then sculptures, then we had to learn about abstract art just for fun. Then there was a test. My poor kid had to take a test about Henry VI on the first day of kindergarten. Twice. He only got a 60% the first time, so he had to redo it. (The school policy is not to let you move on until you have an 80% or higher.) How dare he not know enough about English royalty by age 5. Clearly I have been slacking on my motherly duties.

Apparently the curriculum writers for art & history have never met an actual 5-year-old boy, or else they would realize that their audience has the attention span of a fly on crack and plan accordingly.

The last thing that I will complain about (I'm not sure why this feedback seems so negative, because I'm actually liking it ok so far) is that I don't appreciate that there is no "opt out" option for tasks that are already mastered. We have to complete one online lesson to get to the next and I also have to completed a portfolio of completed paper assignments. For one of the lessons I gave him the final assessment first as a pretest and he got 100%. We should have been able to skip that lesson all together, but we had to spend an hour "practicing." Pre-tests, people. It would be awesome if there was a pretest at the beginning of each online lesson, it could track progress between the beginning and end of the lesson and also allow for a lot less time wasted completing unnecessary work. If the student demonstrates mastery of a task before you teach it, then you don't waste time teaching it. Duh.  

Even though I might sound a bit grumpy,  I really like a lot of the aspects of it so far. I have found that I'm much more patient than I thought I would be and that Nicholas is progressing faster and further in just this week than I would have expected to see in the entire first month. Phonics is his best subject. Who would have thought? The teachers have agreed to excuse us from the required live class sessions on certain days so that we can still participate in Community Bible Study and our Mom N Me program. Also it is going pretty quickly. So far we have been able to complete most, if not all, of our work by lunch each day. We also got to go to a meet & greet last night with some more people from the school.

It was definitely the right choice for us.