Cyberschool
sweetsurrender9
member
Star Annice asked if I would talk a little more about cyberschooling. I stole this from a response I just wrote to the post on charter schools, so I'm sorry if you read this twice... but here you are! If you have any questions, please feel free to ask. Not a lot of states have this option, but I hear that Connections Academy is starting to spring up in more states. They use the K-12 curriculum, which is pretty challenging. They were one of the schools that we looked at when we were choosing, but we didn't feel that E was ready for the rigorous academics quite yet.
We do a cyber charter. SS learns in a kind of "uneven" way. He was a late reader, and is still a reluctant reader, so any subject that is reading based (i.e.: social studies, science, English) is a little bit of a fight, and is challenging for him. However, anything that's more hands on and less reading based is more exciting for him. In the typical school setting, it was a gigantic challenge for him to learn well and not get frustrated. His grades and behavior both reflected these problems.
At home, however, we're able to make the reading based subjects more fun and take trips to the museums, the science center, etc. to make them more "real" to him. He's able to breeze through the things that he understands quickly without having to wait for the rest of his class.
We also found that E doesn't function well on the regular school day clock, so school at home doesn't start until almost 9:30, when we get up and eat breakfast. He then gets to pick the order in which he does his classes. We do a class or two, depending on the work load, take a break, may do another class, eat some lunch, attend any required chat sessions, then finish up in the early afternoon. At the end of the day, we scan or photograph and submit that day's work. All in all, the day usually takes no more than 4 hours, depending, again, on the work load.
We love our charter and wouldn't go back to a brick and mortar school now for anything. We socialize through extracurriculars, and that works out perfectly well. My suggestions to you would be to find a place in your house, whether it's the kitchen table, your home office, or wherever, that you can devote to schooling. Our first year, we didn't have that until halfway through the year, and at that point, everything became so much better. Expectations were clearer, things were found and left at the school area, and the day went so quickly. Good luck, and if you have any questions, feel free to page me or PM me!
Re: Cyberschool
It is. E has a teacher assigned to him who answers any of his questions, so we're not entirely responsible for knowing all of the content we teach. (Not a big deal now, at the fourth grade level, but later, I could see this being a challenge.) It also affords him the opportunity to take interesting classes like this year's Introduction to Foreign Languages. He'll be introduced to French and Spanish, and then have the option of choosing a language to take next year.
Each class has an assigned chat session, where the kids participate via headset and webcam, so they get to "meet" each other and the teacher throughout the year. The chats are optional, but when SS is here, he's required to do them, because we find that he really blossoms and learns material better if he does participate.
The city schools in our area aren't particularly great, and for a few reasons, private schooling wasn't necessarily an option, so I'm glad that SS's adults could all agree on this.