More Frustration

This week I received an email from our instructional supervisor saying, "I'll be ordering your materials after the first of August". !? I went back through all of the recent emails and found one from July 2nd that said, "Email me when you receive your curriculum". Silly me! I thought that implied the materials had been ordered at that point. After a few heated emails and one subdued phone call, I am resigned to the fact that the bulk of my books will not arrive until August 17th. I was told that the school CAN NOT order from Calvert until August. I asked if it would be possible to write into our GIEP that in order to compact the curriculum and create a plan with (what they call enrichment material and what I call the REAL learning) I should be allowed to order the next year's Calvert package in June. GIEP is supposed to trump school policy. However, in our state, cybers are not actually required to follow a GIEP. At this point, no one at the school seems to know the regulation and they follow the rules as if they could get called on it if they didn't. I'm hoping to use this to our benefit for next year. I just don't know if I can feel fully prepared with so little prep time.

We have set our start day for August 24th. The school's first day is actually the 31st, but we are taking a week off in October, so I'd like to put in 6 weeks before that break. At this point, I have done little with the piles in the classroom. I did begin looking through the 4th grade math text. JT will be taking the lesson 20 and 40 tests after we review one or two concepts. When I asked him, "How would you like to cover 40 lessons in one hour?" He said, "Cool!". We will probably then move back into the Life of Fred books that we started at the end of last year. I might throw a day or two of Calvert math in, but probably won't really start it again until after the October break.

I also went online to the Calvert website and found that I could look inside most of their text books. I was able to look at the table of the contents for the 1st grade math for EM. It looks like he will have an extremely compacted year with the math. I only found about two concepts that I think we will need to explore. Depending on how that pans out, I may move him directly into Singapore Math.

I also found out that first grade has science as an optional class. We will not need to worry about sending in tests, which means I can attempt to teach similar units for the boys together, going more in depth for JT. We will also have more opportunity for hands on fun!

My game plan now is to leave the entire week of the 17th open for planning. Maybe my material will come when expected and maybe not....but since my new goal is flexibility, we will just have to go with the flow!