Our Home School

So, who are we, and how do we home school?

If you've clicked over from our family blog, this is all old news to you. But if you've clicked over from somewhere else, let me introduce us.  You can read through the blogs labeled "Home School Routine" and that will give you an idea of who we've been over the years, but as our home school has changed a great deal in the last 12 or so months, what you'll read there is more history and not so much current events.  So who are we today? And how did we get here?

Well, it all started when my oldest son was only 3.5 years old. He wanted to learn to spell, and didn't understand why the letter A could say different things, such as in apple vs. able. Not knowing what else to do, I called my aunt who home schooled and she suggested we start phonics work.  I bought Explode the Code pre-Code books (Get Ready, Get Set, and Go for the Code) and he dove in, happy to have something telling him the rules for letters, sounds, spelling and reading. Before that year was out, I'd bought our first full curriculum (Sonlight's then K level Core, which used to be called Basic....) and he had typed a story. I'll have to dig it up and post it sometime....

By the time he was Kindergarten aged (nearly 6, because of cut-off dates and a fall birthday), he was reading at a 3rd grade level, doing math at a 2nd grade level, knew a ton of science stuff and history and I knew that a traditional Kindergarten classroom would bore him.  So we kept doing what we'd been doing and entered the official world of home schoolers.

A few years later his younger brother was ready for school, so I just added him in, passing down the books we'd used with my oldest.  He didn't quite take off with reading in the same way and was almost 7 before he moved from leveled readers to beginner books like Frog and Toad. Once he started, though, he never looked back.

That year, and the 2 or 3 years after, was hectic. Our youngest son was born nine weeks early and spent seven weeks in a NICU several hours from our home. Once he was finally home, he had various therapists who came to the house every other week to work with him. And he never napped. At all. And he didn't understand boundaries. At all. He climbed things (like bookshelves and tables) before he could even walk. So for about three years, we did as little formal school as possible, scraping by with the bare minimum, the most necessary of necessities.

Then we moved. To a different country. Where home schooling wasn't really heard of, at all, and was almost kind of sort of not really okay. Luckily, by this time, the youngest was calming down some and so we could do more than the bare minimum. More luckily, when we informally tested our boys just to check, they scored around the 85th percentile on standardized tests for their grade levels, even after nearly three years of bare minimum schooling. For the first four-ish years then we scooted along, still doing what we'd always done, only alone.

Then "kind of sort of not really okay" became "definitely not okay" and we had to change things. As of this past year, we enrolled the oldest in an on-line private school for his first year of high school.  We enrolled the middle son into 2 classes at the same on-line school, for his first year of middle school (and will increase that each year until he has a full course load as well).  And we had the youngest evaluated for dyslexia as, at 7.5 yrs old he still couldn't always remember what sounds each letter made, let alone put them together into words.

So here we are now. The boys are now 15, 12 and nearly 8.  I oversee the work of the oldest, just making sure he stays on schedule with things. He is earning As and high Bs in all his courses.  I oversee the middle boy's work -- two on-line classes (English and Science), one at home computer course (math), and do minimal teaching (history/geography) but he's mostly self-directed.  He is earning As in all of his computer based courses and I don't grade geography.  And I've just started a very intense program with the youngest to help move him towards literacy, per the suggestions of the Educational Psychologist who evaluated him. She helped me work up a curriculum plan, and we all have high hopes that he will, in fact, learn to read one day.

My/our home school today looks vastly different than I ever imagined it would, but it keeps with my philosophy of meeting each child where he needs. Each boy is thriving in his own way and getting exactly what he needs right now, to the best of our ability to provide it. Even if it's coming mostly from textbooks now instead of Sonlight books, which is not something I ever thought would happen.

So, that's us. Who we are, what our school looks like now, and how we got here. Follow along and watch where we're going next.......