I've been reading these updates but haven't had a chance to post.

After attending public school kindergarten last year, DS6 is homeschooling this year, though he attends a very hands-on school-for-homeschoolers (more formal than a co-op, more hands-on then most traditional schools) much of the week. It has been a nearly ideal fit for him, with the exception of math.

The math teacher does pre-testing--HUZZAH for her!--and he tested out of Math 1 with a 100%. No problem there. So I requested the Math 2 pre-test, and to her credit, she gave it to me, though she was not convinced that it was a good idea to skip him two levels. I said we'd see what we saw before we decided what he needed.

Testing out of Math 2 required an 80%, and he got an 86%. Most of the points he missed were for taking too long to give an answer or for an arithmetic error because he did 3-digit subtraction in his head. In terms of concepts, he only missed a point or two out of some 160+ points.

Still, he was nervous about testing out of two grades, and I didn't see the point in advocating to do so if he wasn't excited about it. I was pretty sure Math 2 was not going to work for him for long, particularly since there was quite a lot of homework for the class, all stuff that DS6 had mastered years before.

I was right. He was bored.

We had some other schedule problems related to carpooling and my not having enough time at home. Ultimately, the fact that math wasn't working well for him was just another reason to drop his morning classes and do those subjects (reading/writing in addition to the math) at home.

So far, so good. The up-side of his having been underchallenged and over-homeworked in math is that he appreciates the level of difficulty I'm giving him and the general lack of busy work, so he works hard for me. I was not sure he would work well for me given our personalities, so it's going far better than I had expected, frankly. smile Yay!

He's challenged, he loves his classes, especially his science and TaeKwonDo classes, and he's happy. He hangs out with DS9 and his 10-12yo friends playing Pokemon and other imaginative play games. That isn't my ideal for him. I wish he were playing more with kids closer to his age and weren't in his brother's shadow so much. (He doesn't seem to feel that way, but it's what I worry about.) But given a choice of what to do, he does choose to play imaginative games, and these older boys are the kids who play those. I have watched him at recess, and he seems to be truly included, so I'm not going to let it bother me. DS9 looks out for him, and that helps.

To be clear, he *does* have classmates he likes and talks about, so it's not like he's completely with the older kids. But he doesn't usually choose to play with similarly-aged peers at recess yet because they don't want to pretend to be Pokemon trainers. Maybe eventually he'll convert some of them. wink

So to summarize, homeschooling with the addition of the school-for-homeschoolers is going even better than I anticipated. I'm pleased.

Kriston