I get a lot of funny looks from people when we say we homeschool and then ATD gets a few "do you like it" questions. The last one bothers me because he would still choose to go to school to play :) which is one of the reasons we are homeschooling....so we started homeschooling for a few reasons. The first being that he figured out he did not have to do the work in order to get to go play. All he had to do was fill in some answers...right or wrong...turn it in and then he could go play. So towards the middle of the 3rd grade he started bringing home pages and pages of work that was mostly wrong. Being the good (or he would say mean) mom that I am, I made him redo the work at home. He didn't need any help to do the work and would get most of it right on the first try. After about a week of this I asked him why he could not do this at school and he told me he just had to turn it in and then he could go play. What a smart boy :) About the same time this was going on, they were talking about taking his class from 3 teachers down to 2 teachers for the next school year. At that point we started talking about homeschooling. After much prayer and me going back and forth we decided to give it a try. We have several families in our church that home school and were more than willing to help us out and answer questions. We joined a very large CO-OP that keeps track of hours, does yearly testing and has lots of sports he could do when he gets older. I do not think we will join it again next year but will when he is old enough to play sports with them. I also found a CO-OP closer to home that meets once a week and has classes kids do together. This year they did history, science, sign language, PE, and art. OTD also goes to a pre K class during this time. We also found a history class he could take once a week. We are still working out the kinks, but we will do it again next year and I plan to start Pre K stuff with OTD next year. I think ATD will always choose to go back to public school because of the fun factor, but i think he is getting a better one on one education. Don't get me wrong, he gets PLENTY of social time...but never enough for him :)
This past year i used several different home school curricula- Bob Jones for reading/LA, Math U See, and Life Pacs for science and history and Shirley English for grammar. I liked the Bob Jones. After reading the stories, it makes the kids go pretty deep into the story for the questions. It also included Bible lessons. For math, I did not feel he had a good handle on multiplication, so we basically redid 3rd grade math before we started 4th grade. He did an awesome job. Finished all but 5 lessons for the 4th grade math and we will do those as a review before we start 5th grade...so 2 years of math in one year...pretty good :) I was not impressed with the Life Pacs. I'm sure they would work for some kids, but not for him. As far as testing went this year, he did a great job. There are a few areas to work on and then in other areas he tested out at a 9th grade level... Next year we are going to try a computer based program and cont with the Math U See.
