We made it to Friday! Our first official week of home school is complete and we are all still alive to talk about it. Ha ha.Because I had no idea what to expect I purposely cleared our schedule of any daily outings so that we could get into the routine of doing school every morning. Honestly, staying home was the hardest part of the week. We are used to having friends over to play, heading out for impromptu lunches at Chick-fil-a after grocery shopping and things like that. But, it was necessary for us to take this week to establish the routine.
Here are my initial impressions after a week of using the K12 curriculum here at home through the Georgia Cyber Academy.
- So far Jeremiah is proving to be light years ahead of the Kindergarten curriculum. We purposely took it slow the first week in order to adjust to how it all works, but next week we will probably work on assessing him out of the subjects that he is ahead on so that we can get to content that is more interesting and challenging to him.
- I am not sure that I am going to like all of the lesson preparation and much of the lesson execution being on-line. I find having to be tethered to the computer slows us down and is not convenient for us. Our computer (which is a desk top) is not in the school room. So we spent a lot of time moving back and forth between the office and the school room. I think that I would enjoy lesson planning and preparation more if I had a book in front of me that I could work from.
- I do like that all the attendance is on-line as well as an outline of a general daily/weekly plan. That part makes the administration part of schooling very easy for me.
- This week we did a few hours of school in the morning right after breakfast. This works well and I found that some days we flew through the lessons so we will still have time to add our morning visiting and outings back into our schedule. Although, I will have to be wise about not over scheduling us.
- This is a lot of work! I probably spent about 2 hours a day outside of our regular school time preparing for the next days lessons. (Another reason I don't like everything being on the computer, I would rather be comfortable on my couch in the evenings as I prepare rather than stuck in the office away from Aaron.) I expect this will taper off as I get used to the curriculum and how it is set up.
- This is a lot of fun! It really is lots of fun to learn alongside Jeremiah. He is excited about being in school, having his own desk, reading new books, and getting to do fun activities.
2 comments:
sounds great! so glad this is working out for you. i did giggle a little bit when you said you had to record your attendance... aren't you ALWAYS present, even if you aren't doing school? heh heh.
at austin's kindergarten they form their letters in italics with little connecting lines. do you find that a little weird? i guess it sets them up to write in cursive. WHICH NO ONE DOES ANYMORE!
i have been supplementing austin's kindergarten at home with the book "teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons." i love the book and the concept, but i'm realizing that austin and i are just not cut out for home schooling. i push too hard and he gives up too easily. perhaps he is in part motivated by the social setting of having other kids around? whenever i try to teach him something in a challenging setting this wall comes up. and i've never heard home schooling parents say that, so maybe that is the reason we wouldn't succeed so well with that. anyway, i think you have a better teaching repore? report? rapport! with jeremiah and it looks like everything is going swimmingly! can't wait to hear the next "chapter."
So glad you had a good first week! We took it slow as well. I started assessing Fuller out of phonics on the second day when I learned I could do that. We took it two units at a time, so I didn't over work him (and really, the tests were repetitive, it was annoying).
Since our first week included an out of town guest, I was glad it was very light. Our routine will take a few weeks to work out, but I get what you mean about how staying home was the hard part!
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