Ready or not, here I come!

We are up and running! Monday morning we spent some time working on a few subjects, but didn't really dive in since our youngest was at home. Tuesday morning, with the little one off for his first day at K, we started the real thing. We are using our new classroom. The addition is mostly finished. I still haven't moved everything into it's rightful location, but we are getting there.

*from here on out, I will refer to our son as JT...I'm tired of saying, "our son" or "our child"!

The first day went pretty well. It's really difficult for me to decide exactly how much of the provided material I need to cover. I want to be sure JT has a full grasp of all of the content in each course and yet, I know he doesn't need the volume of repetition provided. I used the vocabulary words as a substitute for spelling words as I had planned. I was so happy! He got six wrong out of 15! It may seem funny to be happy about wrong answers, but for the first time my son needed to study his spelling to prepare for the spelling test he will have tomorrow. I think he will still get a 100% on the final test, but he had to work for it. The main problem with using the vocab words is that there are no exercises in the material for those words. They are meant only to be a challenge to read, not spell. So we went for the old fashioned, write a sentence using the word method.

Another challenge has been dealing with perfectionism issues. Calvert curriculum encourages third graders to be using cursive writing. JT spent little time in second grade working on his penmanship. When I asked him to write a few sentences for practice, he had a minor temper tantrum. It finally dawned on me that he was worried he wouldn't do it perfectly. I encouraged him to "just try" it. Finally, he made a very half-hearted effort and did a lot of grumbling under his breath. I heard him muttering, "I can't believe I thought this would be better than public school...". I would have to say that has been the low point of this week! After lunch, he had recovered and we had a good afternoon. Today I told him we would need to work on his writing again, but he could chose when in the day he wanted to do it. That made all the difference. He said he'd like to get it out of the way, we did it immediately and he did a great job.

Some other issues with Calvert...the material does not have the depth my child desires. For example, the History course for third grade is a study of famous Americans. It starts with Samuel Adams. There was a short passage (less than two pages) with a worksheet or two following. Then it moves on to Patrick Henry. We went to the library Monday afternoon and took out books on both men. He has already finished the one on Samuel Adams. We were able to have a much more thorough discussion after that. I would love to see PA Cyber look into possible supplemental material for advanced students. They could take the framework of the Calvert curriculum and provide a few extras for those who request it. I even said so in our GIEP meeting this afternoon.

The GIEP meeting was kind of funny. Having been a pretty outspoken advocate for my child's education for the last 3 years, it was very difficult to accept the meager GIEP we were offered. I know the GIEP really means nothing since I am able to provide appropriate education within what they require from me. However, in principle, it bothered me to sign something I would have laughed at had our original school provided it. The PA Cyber reps were very positive on the phone and offered to look into getting additional materials about ancient history and WWII (JT specifically requested learning about those this year). We were also offered opportunity to sign up for a few virtual enrichment classes, which we will check out. BTW, the Scantron tests I was worried about, turned out fine. His scores were good and our IS (Instructional Supervisor) was happy with them.

I tried to plan for the next days work during times that JT was completing worksheets or reading from his books. So far, that has worked pretty well. I can't plan too far ahead, since I am not following their Lesson Plan book very closely. Right now, we are on Lesson 20 for Math, Lesson 5 for most other subjects and we are completely skipping Phonics and only occasionally pulling necessary info from the Spelling text. I am following a friends advice to mark each topic with a different colored skinny post it sticker. That is keeping me mostly sane.

So, all in all, this week has been positive and fun. I hope I can keep up with the demands of home and teaching. I know I will really start to appreciate the weekends!