Homeschool Notes of 2009

Lesly — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 01:08:52 +0000

October 10, 2009

Last night we took our son out to one of his favorites restaurants for dinner to celebrate his amazing progress in just one month of homeschooling! I made him a certificate of excellent achievement that had a big fat star on it – he deserved it!

Our school hours go from 8:00 AM to about 2:00 PM. I stress not to pay attention to grades but to understanding the material first because the grades will come as a result.

I am amazed because I haven’t had to many challenges with him as far as doing the work. He does the work and we have discussions about what he learned. Right now we are working on “expanding” his thoughts. Getting him to write more than one sentence about a topic and his ideas and opinions. I am “prepping” him for his first book report.

His reading has improved, his grammar, writing, math skills, everything. What’s making the difference? NO distractions, one on one, compassion, interest, and fun. One day we chased each other around the dinning room table. Boy did we laugh!

So, progress is happening!

To be continued…

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September 17, 2009

Okay, the first few days went great. I felt on top- of- the world – I knew what I was doing. Today is a different story.

Yep. I had my fair share of pissy fits “I don’t want to do that”, type of stuff. Oh and the stalling … “I have to go to the bathroom” business… about a 100 times. I got through it. Yet today I was a total flop.

It was music and art day in the afternoon. The morning was more language arts and spelling – then Mr. Computer stared acting up and my kid went flying into the other room to play with the new kitty while I fixed things to continue our lessons. By the time everything was good it was lunch time. Geez, trying to get him to do anything now would cause a MAJOR pissy fit and he’d probably call the child advocacy organization to complain.

So, I waited and planned my music lesson, guitar lessons and drawing. My first mistake was counting on my personal recall in playing the guitar. Oh for pete’s sake, what was I think’en! I haven’t played guitar since I was 20-years-old (good’ole Pete Seeger songs too). So there I was with my long finger nails trying to teach my boy how to tune his guitar!

Are you crying yet?

I think that lesson lasted 5 minutes when he gave me a blank look. Hm… well on to the next thing.

Art! I would be GREAT at this having painted a few pictures in my time, my dad was an artist, this will be a snap. Wrong. He hated it. He drew a picture of a guy from the Halo # game. I think it took him 2 seconds.

“Is school out now?” he asked. I slowly forced the words from my mouth .. ” y…e…s…”. Poof, he was gone – deep into the abyss to play Halo 3.

Whilst I sat in my dinning room with my head in hands – I thought “this is only week one!”

I realized that I have to plan better. This is turning out to be quite a learning experience for me – forget the kid! Now how many weeks to go?

To be continued…

Lesly
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September 11, 2009

I read many articles about homeschooling to prepare and educate myself. An interesting term I read often about was “decompression”. It means a period of adjustment where the the child that comes from a traditional, public, or other school environment is “un-schooled” and needs time to adapt to the new learning environment. Behaviors may range from sadness to not being motivated, etc.

I did see some of this – not much. I saw it when he took a quiz and got some answers wrong he felt bad about not getting 100%. I told him it’s more important to learn the material not get a good grade on testing. My son told me teachers would call him stupid. Heavens … what kind of education is that? The face is – he learned more with me in two days than he learned in a week of school.

I learned the most though. You can always learn from your children … always.

First, I am not teaching a class! I have one child, so there is plenty of time to expose him to many topics of interest.

Second, take time, don’t rush, give him lots of breaks in be-tween topics. Break things up.

I think my son is seeing in himself how really smart he really is – for the first time. And THAT is something to build on and that homeschooling is giving him ….

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September 2, 2009

Here we go! I am going to write about my new experiences as an official Homeschool Mom…

I say official because I sent a certified letter to the school principle saying my son as of September 9, 2009 will be home-schooled. I also cc’d to my lawyers (my monthly membership to lawyer access) to show I have legal backup and support and that I MEAN it. I also included a copy of NJ’s Law and Statue on Homeschooling.

I got the certified return response card today. Yay! It’s official! Now from what I have read, homeschooling can be quite a wonderful experience , start slow and easy, try student-directed interests. I am setting up lesson plans and using Time 4 Learning online home-school program. We’ll follow the school calendar so my child will be off when his friends are..

I am excited! And I’ll be contributing to reducing lunch garbage at school!

The Green RN mom rocks! I crack myself up!

Lesly

Homeschool Notes of 2009

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Homeschool Notes of 2009