Hi there Rhiannon. I had my eldest enrolled at eBus for two years (Grade 1 and 2). We came to eBus from always-unschooling, so we were not looking for curricular support or structure of any sort. We were mostly interested in the financial support they were offering. My eldest is/was very advanced as well, reading Harry Potter etc. at age barely-5. E-Bus seemed to work fine for us for those two years. I found the reporting to be easy enough and we appreciated the money we got from them. They did not provide curriculum or do any planning on our behalf. The provision, structuring and implementation of any curriculum was totally up to me. Perhaps that's changed -- that was 5 years ago -- but I very much doubt that they hand you a curriculum plan and instructions for implementing it. At the time they were very willing to be totally hands-off and undemanding. As long as I did the sort of reporting they wanted, they were happy to leave us alone.
The issue we had was that my daughter was not at all output-oriented. She did not like to provide "evidences of learning" that we could mail in to the eBus OLT. She felt annoyed at the prospect of being judged for her important creative learning work. In retrospect I can see she was refusing to create stuff on paper for fear of having it enthusiastically gobbled up and sent off to some teacher in Ft. St. John as proof of her abilities. I sent in the odd poem scribbled on restaurant napkins, recordings of her playing violin or piano, photos of artwork, lists of books read. It was enough at that time, for a 7-year-old, because she was clearly far beyond the curriculum expectations.
But by the end of her Grade 2 year, the eBus administrators and teachers were beginning to make noises about demanding workbook-type evidence of Learning Outcome Mastery. That was not going to fly with my kiddo. Our eBus teacher's suggested solution was to do testing to have her labelled Learning Disabled (dysgraphic) and Gifted, create an IEP and then she would no longer have to provide evidence that she could spell tedious Grade 2 words or whatever. For a few days I almost thought this made sense. Then I had an epiphany. Why does a child who is thriving, who is happy, academically very advanced, creative, learning naturally and easily, in an environment that suits her to a tee, need psycho-educational testing and dual labelling?
We quit, and almost immediately she began churning out writing and other output with a passion that has continued unabated to this day. Her 'dysgraphia' vanished as she got more and more practice at writing, driven by her own interest. She's still very private about it, but at least she's now creating. So for her, even subtle expectations that she should be providing proof on paper of her natural learning were too much, and eBus was not going to be a good fit for her academically unless we jumped through all those testing hoops and got her labelled. I figured there were better ways to come up with $1000 for my child.
Now if you have a child who likes producing written output, and who perhaps has already been labelled by the school system, eBus might fit your family better than it fit ours. Actually, my two youngest would probably do fine with eBus, but my elder two needed something different.
We spent a few years as registered homeschoolers (not utilizing a Distributed Learning program like eBus) and then recently jumped aboard the Wondertree
SelfDesign Program, a DL which is much more in tune with our child-led educational philosophy. It suits us very well for the most part.
Miranda
