With the creation of facebook and the death of my laptop I have severely neglected the blog.
The big things that have changed this year are me being laid off and taking Shaun out of public school to start homeschooling. I haven't made the lay off a secret, nor how much I am enjoying being paid to be a stay at home mom while I look for work.
Homeschooling has not been so public. For years I have wanted to homeschool. Shaun is a rather unique child and it has been a constant struggle emotionally, physically, and educationally for him to be in public school. Finally we had enough. The final straws were when he brought home three weeks worth of assignments that he had gotten zero credit. Each days work was 5 grammar questions or sentences and five days worth each week. Each day was worth 1 point, if he missed 5 points of any question for any day he received NO credit for the whole week worth of work-really ridiculous.
Next he took his chapter one test in math and got 30% because he finished less than half of it. He was able to retake the test and receive 70% or his better score whichever was less. He was getting caught up on long division (a simple multiplication or subtraction error can throw the whole thing off) so I told him not to do those problems at all. He worked all the rest of them and ignored the long division until the end then he only attempted one of them. He earned 85% by skipping those 3 problems and proved to his teacher that he didn't need to be in the lower math class, he really was bored, and just made 3 mistakes but understood all the concepts.
Finally, he had an assignment in Social Studdies. The instructions were that he repeat the question in the answer (why I don't know). #1 was to list the 5 seas in alphabetic order. He wrote "The five seas are ..." and listed them in alphabetic order. He got it wrong because he did not write "The five seas IN ALPHABETIC ORDER are...". ARE YOU KIDDING ME??? You are going to ruin a child's grade and self esteem for THAT???
November 15, we started school at home. "Independent Study" and it has been wonderful. He does math with online quizzes from the same book he was using at school. We studied plate techtonics with play-dough and spelling and vocab with words he mispelled during assignments or didn't know the meaning of. PE is walking the dog or bouncing on the tramp (since his swim team has stopped for the holidays). He is learning spanish which he wouldn't be able to study until next year. He plays the piano and violin every day and we start with "a proverb a day" (stolen idea from the duggars) and reading the Book of Mormon. Writing assignments consist of writing the articles of faith. We start about 8am and end at noon. There is no homework and he gets to play with as many friends as he wants. He takes an art class and a writing class at the charter school on Tuesdays and we go to the park with a homeschool group Mon afternoons.
I don't know what we'll do if I find a job, but for now we are taking it for all it's worth.
I am also going to be working on a few new business ventures so we will see how it goes, wish me luck!
Happy New Year.
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