Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments calling all homeschoolers...help...

My husband wasn't really on board with homeschooling when we started this year. The evidence speaks for itself. Once in a while he will mention how "they aren't learning anything" because we have a more relaxed schedule. When this comes out I send the kids to him with questions and reading for a few days and that eliminates that once he sees how they are really doing. He had a hard time with the reality that one on one takes a lot less time to complete the same material than a classroom would.

My DH was pretty well sold when he realized a) how much we could do, and b) how little oversight there is over HSers. "If it were ineffective or bad for kids," he figured, "the state would make it a lot harder to do."

I'm not sure his logic on b) is totally right there, but I think it's at least a point to consider.

My DH wasn't totally on board with homeschooling when I first brought it up as an option. He totally gets it now and sees how much better this is for DS compared to our current local school options. He need only page through the pile of books we're working on. We're about to go spend a week in DC which would not be doing if we were in regular school. And I can't say enough how little "work" it feels like we do. Maybe 1-2 hours a day. DS has learned typing and programming this year, completely on his own, among other things he's just picked up.

Last night we were at a neighborhood event where my 2nd grader ran into a former classmate in K and 1st. This little boy really likes my son and hassled him about coming back to school. DS eventually said "When I homeschool, I get to learn things I didn't already know. There's no way I'm coming back!" Sometimes kids can say things best!

Just an update-- I had the meeting with the school and wound up agreeing to set aside my plans to homeschool for the rest of the year.

I had the teacher, the principal, and the guidance counselor all staring at me in stunned disbelief.

You're going to do...what?

I don't think anyone's ever voluntarily left this school before.

We are going to try an onslaught of positivity with him instead-- to try to ease the intense anxiety which seems to undermine his efforts.

They are going to let him type his work and might even get him his own little hand-held word processing machine.

I will just have to make more time to afterschool him and feed his other passions and keep his love of learning alive.

I'm still reading The Well Trained Mind and making plans to systematize what I teach him... so all these suggestion were still really helpful... it may still happen.

I hope your son's anxiety gets better. I know from my own personal experience that it is difficult to learn while dealing with anxiety. It would have been harder for my son to afterschool because of his fatigue issues and sensory issues. He needed to be allowed to learn at his level and take breaks when he needed them and even then he would have been worn out by the end of the day. I think my son would very likely have suffered from anxiety trying to deal with his issues and this would have made him even more tired.

Although our principal and some teachers told us we needed to homeschool after Kindergarten, I felt a lot of disapproval from other teachers when they heard I would be homeschooling. I didn't have a lot of confidence that I could homeschool at the time. I remember one teacher telling me "I hope you are going to teach him phonics" and I worried that I was going to do something wrong even though he was already reading at a 5th grade level in Kindergarten. I could see the disapproval in the eyes of an experienced homeschool mom when I told her I was just going to let him keep reading from the science encyclopedia that he loved to read from instead of buying a reading textbook.

I didn't have a lot of money to buy homeschool materials so I let him do a lot of online learning. For some reason I had all these people wanting to give me advice, and they all let me know they didn't approve of him being on the computer so much.

I had to learn to quit worrying about what other people thought and let my son learn in the way he learned best including letting him type instead of doing a lot of writing and worksheets.

Bronxmom, that's a great news. They are willing to change things around and give him more accommodations. Hopefully this will do the trick for your son.

If things don't work out you can always hs. It's nice to know that there is another option even if you never end up using it.

Good luck

I'm going to assume Lori H that your son doesn't have dysgraphia?

We had the same experience Bronxmom! In our meeting when I mentioned that we'd just homeschool if we couldn't get something worked out, you could hear a pin drop. DD6's Kindergarten teacher looked at me like I announced I was selling DD's kidneys to the highest bidder!

We eventually moved to a place where the girls are at school half time and proceed in their own program for half the day, independent of the brick and mortar school. We've had some unfortunate issues with one of the teachers, but overall, it works well.

Sounds like you have a great plan, good luck.

Can anyone else describe how they managed to do what I read Dr. Ruf did - half home school their kid and somehow still got their local school to agree to do afternoon lessons of resources like art, musi?

A school system in our area allows it, but not our school. It seems like who does and who doesn't allow it is rather a crapshoot.

Illinois has a state law requiring it, right, 'Neato? Or do I have that wrong?