Day 55

The painting picture is from November when we did some basic lessons on mapping. He painted a map to his favorite haunted house from Halloween. 

Today we made rice krispie squares. I've discovered cooking is good for math, measurement, following instruction, basic life skills and patience!

Homeschool Community

We live in a small but thriving rural community. Recently we hosted a homeschool holiday skating party. 3 families came to join us and it was a lot of fun. G and my husband especially enjoyed playing hockey together for the first time. After skating we ate some food and the kids played and made crafts.

Christmas Crafts

I love doing art for homeschool. All of my kids like crafts and making art,so everyone gets involved.

Day 51

Day 51 seems like an odd day to start this blog. In truth, I created this blog over 2 months ago, with the intention of starting it right away, on day 1. Our real world sets its own timeline! It has been a busy 2.5 months getting into the swing of things and also tending to a brand new baby. I would love for this blog to become a diary of sorts, a way to chronicle the journey we’re taking with our son. We officially pulled him from public school a day before his 7th birthday on September 21, 2015.

This was not a decision we arrived at lightly. G started public school in September of 2014. Very soon after we began to encounter behavioral difficulties like impulsivity and aggression when overstimulated and overwhelmed. We had encountered these at home and during his 3 years of preschool, but definitely not to the extent we were seeing in public school. We quickly tried to address the issue through privately obtained visits with a pediatric psychologist and a speech therapist. His primary teacher changed routines to try to avoid the activities and situations that were stressful for him, and also initiated a reward based system for positive behaviours. We changed his program so he would attend school only in the mornings and come home before lunch, and things seemed a bit better in the second half of Primary. It was stressed to us many times that academically he was doing fine, but the behaviours were the challenge. However, I felt that his academic skills were not where they should be at this stage. He was still not able to identify much of the alphabet, he was still at the most basic of reading levels, and I had no indication that he had made any progress in numbers. We attempted to do some at-home learning, but after being in school, he was emotionally and physically drained and not able to concentrate on additional work.

After his first year in public school, we found ourselves dreading back-to-school time. We were unsure how the start of grade one would go for our normally sweet, funny and creative guy. On the third day of school we had the first phone call of the year to come pick up our son due to behaviours. The stress level in our family was reaching a high level. You could even see a change in G as he walked through the front doors of the school. Immediately he seemed jittery and unsure of himself. The first day of school was September 3rd, and between that day and the 21st, he only attended a few full days at school, the rest ended early with a phone call for us to pick him up and the rest we were asked to keep him home. On the 21st we had a meeting with the school where they gave us their action plan, including reducing his time at school to half days again. They also had 50 minutes of educational assistant time approved. 50 minutes. And part of the plan included him hanging out with the cook in order to keep him occupied and out of trouble. We came to the meeting with a firm decision to homeschool. They were supportive of this decision during the meeting, although the year before when we inquired about homeschooling half way through the year with the department of education, the school said they wouldn’t give him a passing grade for primary and felt that homeschooling G was the wrong path and a bad decision.

We feel like it was the best decision we could have ever made for our son. After 2 and a half months of learning at home, he’s starting to get his sense of humour back, he’s being more loving and giving unsolicited hugs again, he’s not so uptight about being touched when he’s upset. And he’s learning! The one-on-one is exactly what he needs. I truly feel he was headed down a dark path by continuing with public school right now. I think homeschooling is saving our family, particularly our son, a whole lot of heartache.

G and his baby sister born September 1, 2015