Sunday, November 15, 2009

K12: an update

We've been at this K12 thing for 5 weeks and I'm not gonna lie, it's been tough. I spent a lot of days thinking about quitting, wondering when we could quit, wondering what our next plan would be if we did quit. Yet, here I am still planning to continue through Christmas break and probably through the rest of the school year.

And here is why:

When we first started out, it was very overwhelming. Arwen's school is entirely with me. All of Kali's lessons are adult guided, so I at least need to teach her concepts before she can work on her own. And Sierra still needs a lot of help understand what she is supposed to do.

I was overwhelmed and I also felt stuck. Even if we quit K12, I still had to figure out how to make sure all 3 of my kids were being academically challenged. At this point I was thinking that public school may be best choice because while teaching elementary age felt within my ability, teaching a middle schooler AND 2 elementary aged kids was seeming to be almost impossible. But now we live in Hawaii where the schools are horrible, so Rand felt that public school would not be an option. So I felt stuck.

And feeling stuck made me cranky and made me have a bad attitude about K12. I finally came to terms with the fact that right now homeschooling is the best option for my kids and that for this school year K12 is what we should be doing. It is still hard and time consuming, but at least now I have a better attitude.

My plan (at least for this week...) is to keep doing K12 this year and then go back to doing our own thing next year. One good thing about K12 is that it has helped me to see the things we were missing in our homeschool. After doing K12 for a year, I feel like I will be better prepared to create an appropriate curriculum for each of my kids. Also, I think it will be a good experience for my kids to attend the classes (even if they are an hour drive away and take way too much time out of our schedule...). I am hoping to work on getting the most out of using K12 this year and trying not to get stressed out over it.