This is my first time posting in this forum, it's a huge step for me to put pen to paper on this subject, or rather fingers to keyboard as the whole idea of homeschooling is overwhelming to me.
My oldest is 6.5, I've always had a notion at the back of my mind that schooling was going to be challenging with him. He was born in the UK, but we moved to the US a little over 3 years ago, we found a great christian preschool close to our house and he did a 3-4 class, then a 4-5 class and as they run a K class we decided to keep him there for that year and he did great, it was part time, 2.5hrs in the morning with the option to stay for lunch some days and he usually did on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The class was small, 10 to start of with and dropped to 9 mid year, they had two teachers as well as parent volunteers.
Although it did go very well, there were still some issues, many easily accountable for by different rates of development amongst different children, some more unique to him, but the reasons it seemed to work are all reasons that got lost as he moved to public school for first grade.
We did open enrollment to avoid an enormous school that would definitely have been overwhelming for him in the hope that a smaller school would be a bit easier. I think a lot of things that he'd gone through have been normal and have just been a case of learning how school works and that kind of thing, but lately I've become more concerned, to the extent that I think we are at a point where we have to do some serious hard work with the school and him to make it work, or seriously consider homeschooling.
There are huge issues with homeschooling for me, we have a 6mth old baby and I have had severe postnatal depression which hasn't been responding well to treatment. I'm sure that a difficult situation at home has impacted on how he's doing at school and if it it wasn't for having had it in the back of my mind for years that he had the kind of personality that school wasn't going to work well for then I'd be dismissing the problems as down to that.
Another issue that I have to factor in is our 4 year old, she's the opposite to him and whilst I think there may be some completely different hurdles to overcome for her at school, deep down I think she's the kind of child that is likely to thrive in school, so if we do end up homeschooling, I have to consider how it might work if one is in school and the other isn't, I can see a whole host of jealousy issues going both ways.
My husband is inclined to blame the whole situation on my PPD. I was always going to give school a go and it's a shame it's clashed with this time to make it extra hard, but deep down I still think the problems were going to happen anyway. My husband is also inclined to think that the only problem is that he's not being challenged in school, whereas I think that's only a small part of the problem. He's definitely a bright kid and his K teacher said we should get him tested for gifted and talented, so we turned the forms in and testing is in January. Honestly, I don't think he'll make it this year, but in part that's because of how non responsive he's become, he used to love to chat and answer questions and solve problems, now he's often disinterested. Even if he did qualify for a program I don't think it would be a solution because I feel a proportion of his issues come from the very nature of school itself.
I think he's actually the kind of child that would do well on some version of unschooling, I had a good chat with him today and he was moaning about how they did nothing interesting in science and telling me about all the things he did want to find out about, but then by the time he's home and he's done homework there is no time. He's not overscheduled, he does gymnastics for an hour once a week and dancing for half an hour, we're generally not very busy so the weekends are usually free other than church.
If we pull him out of school, I'm pretty sure he'd lose his place at that school and there were more issues than just the size with the local school, so it seems like if we pull him out then he's out until middle school at least. I really wish I could give it a trial between winter break and spring break, we could keep him up with the necessaries for returning to school in April with a couple of hours a day of work, or even less, then he could just have some time to explore and see what happens!
You can probably see that I'm a huge jumble of emotions right now, I know very little about homeschooling, even though a lot of my friends do it.
My oldest is 6.5, I've always had a notion at the back of my mind that schooling was going to be challenging with him. He was born in the UK, but we moved to the US a little over 3 years ago, we found a great christian preschool close to our house and he did a 3-4 class, then a 4-5 class and as they run a K class we decided to keep him there for that year and he did great, it was part time, 2.5hrs in the morning with the option to stay for lunch some days and he usually did on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The class was small, 10 to start of with and dropped to 9 mid year, they had two teachers as well as parent volunteers.
Although it did go very well, there were still some issues, many easily accountable for by different rates of development amongst different children, some more unique to him, but the reasons it seemed to work are all reasons that got lost as he moved to public school for first grade.
We did open enrollment to avoid an enormous school that would definitely have been overwhelming for him in the hope that a smaller school would be a bit easier. I think a lot of things that he'd gone through have been normal and have just been a case of learning how school works and that kind of thing, but lately I've become more concerned, to the extent that I think we are at a point where we have to do some serious hard work with the school and him to make it work, or seriously consider homeschooling.
There are huge issues with homeschooling for me, we have a 6mth old baby and I have had severe postnatal depression which hasn't been responding well to treatment. I'm sure that a difficult situation at home has impacted on how he's doing at school and if it it wasn't for having had it in the back of my mind for years that he had the kind of personality that school wasn't going to work well for then I'd be dismissing the problems as down to that.
Another issue that I have to factor in is our 4 year old, she's the opposite to him and whilst I think there may be some completely different hurdles to overcome for her at school, deep down I think she's the kind of child that is likely to thrive in school, so if we do end up homeschooling, I have to consider how it might work if one is in school and the other isn't, I can see a whole host of jealousy issues going both ways.
My husband is inclined to blame the whole situation on my PPD. I was always going to give school a go and it's a shame it's clashed with this time to make it extra hard, but deep down I still think the problems were going to happen anyway. My husband is also inclined to think that the only problem is that he's not being challenged in school, whereas I think that's only a small part of the problem. He's definitely a bright kid and his K teacher said we should get him tested for gifted and talented, so we turned the forms in and testing is in January. Honestly, I don't think he'll make it this year, but in part that's because of how non responsive he's become, he used to love to chat and answer questions and solve problems, now he's often disinterested. Even if he did qualify for a program I don't think it would be a solution because I feel a proportion of his issues come from the very nature of school itself.
I think he's actually the kind of child that would do well on some version of unschooling, I had a good chat with him today and he was moaning about how they did nothing interesting in science and telling me about all the things he did want to find out about, but then by the time he's home and he's done homework there is no time. He's not overscheduled, he does gymnastics for an hour once a week and dancing for half an hour, we're generally not very busy so the weekends are usually free other than church.
If we pull him out of school, I'm pretty sure he'd lose his place at that school and there were more issues than just the size with the local school, so it seems like if we pull him out then he's out until middle school at least. I really wish I could give it a trial between winter break and spring break, we could keep him up with the necessaries for returning to school in April with a couple of hours a day of work, or even less, then he could just have some time to explore and see what happens!
You can probably see that I'm a huge jumble of emotions right now, I know very little about homeschooling, even though a lot of my friends do it.
