I homeschooled Brianna for the second half of kindergarten and all of first grade but she is back in regular school this year for second grade. I loved homeschooling but I was not as disciplined as I should have been. I wish I had known about the K12 program early on but I didn’t really find out much about it until halfway thru first grade. I did a lot of it on my own but we also used a website, time4learning.com for the majority of her school work. We went on tons of field trips and did not use a rigid schedule. The schedule was our main downfall. We would do 1 – 2 hour blocks of work then a break then we would do another 1 – 2 hour block of work etc throughout the day. I did not set time limits for her work, when everthing was completed she could play, if it took her all day then she didn’t get to play as much. I did not have a lot of support and I found that a lot of the families in our homeschool group were way different than we are. We had many ups and downs during that time. Reading was the hardest for us. I used hooked on phonics as well as time4learning but she got to a certain point and just didn’t “get it” after that. By spring, I knew something had to change because it was a constant battle to get school done. This was when I began learning about K12 and I liked what I saw. To begin with I decided that I was going to do the online virtual public school (K12). At this point, I still didn’t have much support. Everyone kept telling me that all of her behavior problems was due to homeschooling and our lack of a rigid schedule. My defense was that we did have a schedule, it just wasn’t a normal 7 – 2 school schedule. Our “classroom” ranged from the kitchen table, to the livingroom, to the park some times in the car between doctor’s appointments and even in a hotel when we went out of town. Of course I was told that I put everything ahead of my daughter’s education that that I “fit school in around everything else”. That was not true, my daughter’s education was my number 1 priority. So anyway, back to spring when I was making the decisions for second grade schooling. I knew my daughter had a hard time with reading (even though she excelled in math and science) so we had to do something different. We opted to let her return to regular public school. I will admit, it was the best decision for our family at the time. Brianna is a social butterfly and even though we socialized a lot, she lacked friends her age. She returned to regular school in August. The first week was horrible! Her teacher constantly sent home notes that she was way behind, that she couldn’t keep up, etc. I had a meeting with that teacher and was told that my daughter needed to repeat first grade because she was sure that “we didn’t cover everything she needed in first grade.” At that point I had a meeting with the principal. He looked at her classwork and said that he didn’t feel that she needed to repeat first grade but she did need to be in a different classroom (remember, this was the first week of school). So we moved her and she was immediately able to keep up with her classmates. She does still have difficulty reading but this teacher has her going to the reading assist lab for 45 minutes every morning. She is making amazing progress in everything including reading and I think she will be on target by the end of the year. So basically, make sure that you log eveything that you do. Keep accurate records of all assignments (I used homeschooltracker.com). By using the K12 virtual public school, you shouldn’t have the issues that we had with them wanting to argue whether or not we did grade appropriate work. I wish you and Ashley the best of luck. I hope this is the answer to your prayers. Please keep me updated and let me know how things are going.
~Sherry