Whatever I choose needs to be free, or nearly free.

 

I'm Canadian so I can't really answer your question, but I just wanted to caution you in thinking that somehow using a school-style curriculum at home could be the answer to not having access to gifted programming.

First: in my observation and experience school-at-home seems to be viewed by he regular school establishment as being somehow cheating since it's not a fully rounded-out school experience, and they make up for the lack of, oh, group project work and chalk-and-talk teaching by demanding significantly more busywork than school kids would get. My eldest dd and her friend once did identical courses at the same time, one school-at-home, the other in a bricks-and-mortar school. What would constitute a 10-minute group discussion in the classroom would be turned into a research and writing assignment that would take an hour or two in the school-at-home version. I also think that in the classroom teachers are trusted to keep an eye on student understanding and if maybe 5% of the time some of the students don't seem to be getting something, they'll know to backtrack and reinforce. With school-at-home, with no teacher in the room to make those judgment calls, it's like the curriculum writers want to ensure that there's enough teaching and reinforcement there that the 5% risk that a student won't get something is reduced to less than 1% by repetition and reinforcement.

So there's that. And then there's the issue that simply moving more quickly through a standard curriculum often doesn't address the different ways gifted kids learn. My dd11 is doing preCalculus right now as a homeschooler, out of a standard school workbook/textbook. So she's radically ahead, by 4 years or so. Both of us feel it's a good level for her and she's doing well without much effort. But the thing is, she still finds that the explanations are sometimes too cookbook-ish and stepwise. The level of challenge is about right, but things tend to be presented in tiny incremental steps that bog her down in the details of executing algorithms, rather than showing her the big picture first and then drilling down into the details.

A great explanation I once heard about accelerating gifted kids through a standard curriculum approach was of a cheetah travelling with a camel train. The cheetah, traveling at the back of the camel train, is frustrated by the pace of the train and is bored and annoyed by being held back. Finally the camel drivers tell him okay, you're a cheetah, you're faster: go up and join the first few camels. The cheetah is thrilled because the first few camels are way up in the distance, so far ahead that he can only see their dust. He runs like the wind, excited to be there with them. The problem is that once he gets there the first camels are moving at exactly the same speed as the ones at the back.

So yeah. I don't know why you're looking to do school at home, but it certainly wouldn't be (isn't!) my choice with gifted kids.

Sorry not to be any help with K12 vs. Connections. Hopefully someone else will pipe up.

Miranda

 

The kids prefer a structured traditional school curriculum. They like some flexibility in course choices, but prefer the structured, graded format.

What you say about busy work is part of the reason that I'm asking for input from families that have used either program. I want to know what other families have experienced, both with the content of the curriculum and the experience with the teachers and staff.

 

I'm in Pennsylvania, so I don't know how much of this is going to be the same, but here you go:

You don't say how old your kids are, but my dd did K12 through a public charter for the first half of first grade. It wasn't at all a good fit for either of us, but sounds like it could work for you.

I found there was a lot of repetition/busy work in the K12 program-but, it was also easy to skip a lot of that since most of it was just for practice and didn't need to be submitted/scanned for grading.

They required 6 hours a day, and had a fairly strict schedule they wanted you to stick with. You could work ahead assuming you are doing asynchronous (synchronous required daily classes, so obviously they want you to stick with the class). I thought the K12 curriculum itself was fine, it was more the structure of the school and frequent assessments/testing that didn't work.

Most of the units had some instruction, lots of worksheets/practice sheets, and then the student did a test that was entered into the computer for grading. We also had to scan and send some monthly writing samples and record some reading samples IIRC. So you could easily skip some of the practice if your kids don't need it.

The teacher we worked with was very nice. No problems there. The staff seemed fine, though I didn't interact with them very much.

Hope some of this helps! We had Connections as an option too-I don't really remember how I made the decision between the two-I think maybe K12 looked like it was more unit studies, or at least correlated history/art when possible, or something like that

 

I'm in the same situation leafylady, in that we are planning to move to Michigan next year and so I am also interested to know more about the K12 curriculum because I found out that it is state-subsidized. So thank you for bringing up this question and thank you to everyone who has answered leafylady's questions so far!

 

Thank you all for the replies. I've looked into both Connections and K12 in Michigan so far. Connections actually has a waiting list so it's not really an option for us for this year. I'm going to do some more research on K12, and check out the lesson plans. I think I'll ask one of their reps if there is any way to get input from a current K12 Michigan parent. I haven't seen any info the enrollment and the k12 rep I talked to on the phone didn't really make me feel confident, probably because there were questions that she couldn't answer.

 

I ended up not doing either! There is no way to talk to the local school staff that will be managing your child's education. Every time I called, I talked to some trained salesperson with canned answers about the curriculum but no real sense of the experience with the charter k12 or connections school we were considering.

We went ahead with public school, where at least I can interact with the teachers and staff in person. If public school doesn't work out, I'd switch to regular homeschool not the K12 or Connections, which came across as awfully distant or corporate during the research process.