k12/ virtual academy moms- end of year?

[kittie313]

We finished up our school year earlier in the week so I'm now just logging attendance on the stuff I'm doing over the summer with them. What about the rest of you? Our last day to log attendance is tomorrow, and then I'm free until August on the attendance front. We plan on keeping at phonics and math (new material for Lydia, reviewing for Melissa with concepts she struggled with this year) but that's about it other than reading from the Sonlight stuff I have and doing some lapbooks to go with some of those books we'll read.

I want to hear how everyone else has done this year. And who all is going to be sticking with k12 or their charter for next school year? We were going to leave our k12 school but decided last week to do another year with them just because we are going to need the structure while I'm in college.

[elanorh]

We just finished today, actually!

The past few weeks have been jam-packed - trying to keep up on school, and gardening, and altering a wedding gown and bridesmaids gown, and so on. I'm glad that things are slowing down now!! Dh thinks it's silly that I'm so excited about not having to do attendance and keep up with a schedule ("It wasn't that hard really and you were pretty flexible during the year anyway?!").

I am soooo looking forward to a break from school! I think we'll take a full week without doing any guided work at all. Then, we'll get into an unstructured summer "to do" randomness....

We have the 1st grade math and have been doing that in a desultory fashion for the past few months -- will do more of that as summer progresses. I think we'll find that there's plenty of review, and will probably get through that and well into 2nd grade math during next year's school year.

We plan to order a butterfly kit and grow butterflies this summer; if I can locate some tadpoles, we'll observe those (in a local pond) too. Ina wants to do a lot of birdwatching, and I think we'll do some rock-studying since she's been quite interested in geology lately too. And we plan to have at least a few stargazing nights too.

Otherwise, I'm going to check the easy-reader books out from the library, so Ina can keep working on her reading (she does wonderfully at it!) -- and I think we'll continue to do some handwriting practice and 'spelling bees.' She reads quite fluently but doesn't retain spellings and tends to just spell phonetically (which does make sense I suppose at this stage). But if we can work on her 'sight words' so that she's more comfortable with those, that would be good.

The BIG goals are teaching her how to tie her shoes (she can do the square knots but not the bows yet), and jump rope, and ride her bike without training wheels (she's almost got that accomplished).

I attended two different k12 gatherings this May - a field trip at a local museum, and then a picnic with some local families (3). Both were _OK_. Nothing awesome, but nice for some socializing. I told the teachers who organized the picnic, that it would be nice to have a picnic right before the school year starts in the fall, to kick the year off. Otherwise I think I need to suck it up and go to the two homeschool groups here and see which one is a better fit for us, socially/as a family. Ina has some good friends who are a little younger than her, that we've met at story time and swim lessons, and some that are more "acquaintances" her age from Cloverbuds, but I'd like her to have more friends, she's so social!!

Given how busy May was, and how bugged I was by not getting my garden in -- I'm actually thinking I might start working on school in the fall as soon as the materials arrive, rather than waiting 'til we can 'officially' start -- and work ahead as much as I can, with the goal of finishing 2-4 weeks early so that gardening etc. can get more attention next spring (if we're here in May, in the past we've been traveling in May so the garden didn't go in 'til June anyway, I'm just bugged that this year I *could* have put the garden in and still wasn't able to get to it).

I am a little bit bothered by the fact that the teacher told us that this coming year, we'll need to do a weekly eluminate session with the other first graders. We did one this week as a capstone thing and it was obnoxious.

[Smithie]

James "passed" his end-of-year DIBELS with flying colors yesterday, and we finished the last couple of K-level lessons. We have to do a couple more of the 1st grade Math, Phonics and LA in order to hit to 40% completion goal. We have to log attendance until June 4th, but I'm just marking vacation days once we hit 180 days/ 1080 hours of attendance.

We're going independent for first grade. I may give James a full summer off, since we had no problem hitting the 180 days of required instruction this year and he's at that point where his fine motor skills need to do some catching up with his brain.

[ALittleBitCrunchy]

Our last official day was yesterday but we actually finished last month. DS transitioned to public school 7 weeks ago and it has gone well. K12 helped us get him ready for it - put him in the same place with his peers and helped us realize what we had missed over the years. Like parts of speech - apparently, I had never explained nouns and adjectives and the like very well.

DD is switching to Connections next year. I wasn't impressed with K12's K program. We couldn't even get science and it took them a month to get her 1st grade stuff to us after she finished the K. I didn't care for it at all. So, we're switching and we'll be starting fun things like sign language and Spanish next year She's interested in starting public school but I'm leaning toward waiting another year.

This summer, we're working on sight words with DD, plus some math review. With DS, we're doing reading, math review and handwriting, I think.

[Satori]

Were not staying with K12, we have 2 more weeks left before the end of the year for us. We had a rough year personally and did more very relaxed HS'er type thing and just marking off the lessons and subbing something else to cover what was in the lesson but I more or less let dd do what she wanted. She learned more in a day using MS Word writing letters then a month of the LA stuff. We just did the end of the year scantron and despite not really using the K12 stuff she still passed and showed a year of growth academically. We may stay enrolled and do what we've been doing and using it as a general guide but more then likely we won't. Not really worth the hassle imo. Already found math and LA materials that will take a lot of the fight off me being the bad guy and forcing her to learn from rather dry materials that bores both of us.