Making Changes

Beginning on Monday, January 13, 2014, we switched our oldest - K - from traditional school to a home school/online charter school hybrid.  I suppose that is the driving factor behind this blog, that I want to document what we're doing and why, and just have an outlet.  Now that I'm not going to the bus stop every day, my interaction with the outside world has seriously dwindled.  I need you blogosphere. (Do people still say that?)

So why did we take her out of her traditional school?  It didn't seem like she was getting the challenge there that she really needed.  She would come home from school and say that she had spent three periods on the computer, because she didn't need to work on what the class was doing since she already knew it.  The teacher had told me she was putting K up into 1st grade curriculum for the challenge she needed, but it never seemed to change things so I'm not even sure that was ever followed up on.

Additionally, I was just sick of the schedule.  We are a military family, and our ability to travel home to visit our families is limited.  That was further limited by the strict schedule of a brick and mortar school.  Super frustrating for us.  On top of that, the daily schedule was not working well for our family.  We have K, plus her younger sister (A - 3), and brother (Z - 1).  I had to wake these guys up every morning to sit at the bus stop at 7 am, and then had to adjust/completely mess up their nap schedule to pick K up at 2:30.  So frustrating to have two tired kids all day, just for a 10 minute wait at the bus.  On top of that, I felt trapped in my house by this schedule.  The bus is back too early to get out and do much by the time things open for the day, especially when we live 45 minutes from the bulk of the activities our city has to offer.

Before we even moved here and K began school we were *this close* to homeschooling anyway.  I felt like I was denying K an experience that I wanted her to have, but in the end the frustrations won out.  If she wasn't learning like I wanted her to, and she was usually bored, then we needed to try something different.