August 21, 2008

Speaking of school!

I have been checking online every day for the kids' schedule to be created so that we could get started on school. Today it was there! How exciting! We are going to start next week so that we have a few extra slack days to work with. Plus I like to go to school with Peyton, & now Ashley, on their first days so that I can make sure they're adjusting well and this way we won't get behind on A & W's schooling. (hehe A&W - I'm tired :o) I really like how Connections works it. They send me all the books and basic materials for free, they give me the schedule and assignments, and I teach it to my kids. Then every few weeks I send all their work in and their teacher grades it and keeps track of their progress and grades online for us all to see. This way I don't have to kill myself finding expensive curriculum and hoping that I'm teaching them the right stuff without overdoing it. We are required to log our hours each day and in the end it has to end up at the same amount as a regular school per year. As we do each assignment we mark it off online and then move onto the next one. We can work ahead and then rerun the scheduler so that it reorganizes all of the assignments so we stay busy. If a child finishes their year early they can start on the next grade, which I think might happen with W. I've been looking through his assignments and it's all about the alphabet and things that he already knows. (And to think that his case worker had told us to hold him back a year because he's so young, his birthday is 8/1 and he just turned 5, lol.) When we run the scheduler we can pick how many assignments we want for each subject each day. Then the scheduler will tell us what day at the end of the school year that we will be done with that subject, based on the number of assignments we are planning on doing each week. It's flexible. If we want to do one subject each day, all day, we can do that.
Anyways, we're excited to get started. I can say that it will be a lot of work because the kids can't read yet and I have to read it all to them, but it's SO worth it. See previous post about why we homeschool, lol.

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