Welcome to a new Hammock Home School weekly feature - "A Homeschool Mom Asks..."
I am hoping that in the weeks to come we can explore questions posed by home educating mothers. If you are a home school parent, make sure and stop by on Tuesdays and leave your much needed thoughts. No answer is wrong, as long as it is courteous and kind. Let's put our collective experience together and provide insightful answers.
Of course if you have a question that you'd like to see posted, you can send them to me - Savannah McQueen.
Of course if you have a question that you'd like to see posted, you can send them to me - Savannah McQueen.
Here is Shellie's delimna
I am especially at my wits end with my son. He cries every morning and every afternoon because soon he won't be at school anymore. His reasoning revolves around the bus, in-school celebrations, recess, and the fact that he doesn't remember some of the stuff from homeschooling like higher math numbers and his teacher doesn't make him work that hard. Basically, he hasn't learned anything but better handwriting and how to put thought to paper since he started school. They are behind him in reading, math, they didn't do science, history, grammar, etc. Oh, and he wants "specials" like art and music. I stink at art, and I don't have a music curriculum, or fancy instruments. I feel so inadequate in those areas.
My daughter is upset because her teacher doesn't want her to leave. The teacher calls her "little angel" and says she is the ray of sunshine in the room, keeping morale up and all these other nice, wonderful things I love to hear about her. But still, that is not a reason to stay in school. I hear nothing of learning. She was tested for the "gifted" program, but her IQ isn't high enough. Basically, they were just ahead in their studies, and now they have fallen behind in my eyes. Both of them seemed extremely intelligent next to their public school counterparts, I just had the ability to teach each of them one-on-one.
So now, until I pull them, and for sure for a little while afterwards, there are tears. My son is harder to deal with. I told my daughter to get her friend's phone numbers, and give her number out, and that she could ask her friends over. That pacified her. My son, however, feels that school is the best place ever, and he never wants to leave. If he was learning there, I might be able to "fight the system from within" on some of the things that I don't agree with. But he's not even learning. I am definitely homeschooling them.
All this novella (sorry) to ask if there is a way to transition them without losing time. We have 50 calendar days left, and because of the way the school year ends this year, I will have to school for all 50 of them. So no "deschooling" days. Well, spring break is 4 days, I could de-school then, but what is deschooling anyway? I have never had to deal with any of this because they had never been in school before.
I asked Shellie what she meant by only having 50 days left for schooling and this was her reply:
Basically what it means is that I must do school to include math, english, writing, spelling, reading, daily and extracuicculars which include science, history, music, art, pe, etc, weekly. The law is 180 days. Since they just ended school, they have to do school for the number of days the public school has left. We have to present several things at the end of the year to include:
1) attendance log
2) Daily log, which is a notation of what we did each day of school, so for example:
Math - Pages 1-2 on addition
Reading - read 10 pages in pick the name of a book
3) and a portfolio which includes samples of the childs work in each subject, a few from the beginning, a few from the middle and a few from the end.
In order to best help Shellie, please consider this specific question.
* Is there a way to transition without losing time?
Shellie writes at One Christian Mom.
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