This is a project really. I have never really been thrilled with my reporting ability. I work with kids all the time with little to show for it at the end of the day. All those coloring sheets just get thrown away. I have such dyslexic kids that they end up feeling very unaccomplished. We needed something new. After 18 years of homeschooling, I am bored, I am tired and I am feeling like I have failed.
So as I have stated I was reading about Ron Paul's curriculum. I know nothing about the content but I was loving the concepts for highschool. How can adapt his ideas into what we do? I also don't have the money to buy each young child a computer or an ipad. In trying to figure all this out, dad came across a great deal for Kindle Fire. We went ahead and invested only $60 each for 4 units for Pickle, Princess, Bagel, and Jumba. In our minds the twins are too young and Possible as a nicer Kindle Fire HDX from Christmas. These units have internet ability but so we can visits all the math sites from practices but they don't have the cool apps like the ipads do. That might someday be worth the investment. For now we are trying to get this ball rolling.
We have started the 2014-2015 school year very early this year. For the first month is will be just trying to figure out how and getting into the practice of our new methods of being accountable. It is lots of work right now but I know that eventually it will relieve so much of the stress on me. My goal has always been to get the kids to be self sufficient. They need basic educational skills, they need to be able to apply them and they need to have motivation to keep at it. I have seen so many families push and push the school work only to have the children shy away from school all together later.
I want to encourage the independence while still keeping track. I will always hold out hope that we will move north. Texas is very homeschool friendly, and I love that about being here. I need to get back in the habit of better record keeping in case we get to move into a state with much stricter guidelines. I must admit that it took a lot of time (several hours over the course of everyday for three weeks or do.) I established a homeschool blog for each child. They will use this to report into each day instead of handing me a stack papers that I am supposed to grade and record somewhere. I used blogger because that is what I am familiar with. (I plan to keep them private for a few months until we work out the kinks. I also am not sure how out there I really want to be with the kids. It would be really bad if their friends got at look at their work and started teasing them. To be honest I am not sure they will be public until much later. I guess time will tell.)
We started by getting the kindles hooked up and going. Set them up and downloaded and note taking app. Setting each child up with the right font and colors etc. They will be using this for their writing each day and each week. It was very time consuming setting this up on all five devices. We are still waiting on the arrival of the cases and I will also be getting each child head phones. I had each child write an opening post for their blogs. This was just three or five sentences. It was a lot for some and nothing for others. For the first month I will not be pushing too much with the writing but there will be several things due each week. I am trying to find a routine and get the kiddos in the habit of using the "note" app.
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