Homeschooling: I Guess It's Final Now

Yesterday, me, dh, dd, and baby ds went swimming over at my mil's house. At around 3:30, I heard the school bus dropping off kids. Wow, did school start already?

So today, just for fun, I decided to find out what would my dd be doing if she weren't being homeschooled. To see how the other half lives, I guess. I looked at the map to find out what elementary school she would be attending, and then went to their web site and looked at their calendar.

Kindergarten orientation was last week. Schools started on Wednesday. So our fun day spent swimming and enjoying life would have been impossible.

Since her peers have already registered for school and are already attending, it all seems so final now. I suppose that we could change if we wanted to (not that I do), but we are officially in the realm of being a homeschool family, rather than a family that spends time at home doing school work for fun. This is real now.

I did discover that the school I thought my dd would attend if she were in Public School is not the underperforming one that I thought that we lived in the boundary of. Our school district is actually one that is above standards or whatever terminology NCLB uses to describe a good school. That's good, I suppose. If we ever want to move somewhere else, I guess that's a selling point.

I downloaded the kindergarten curriculum from the site to see what they expected to learn. After a year of homeschooling full time last year, dd has most of it down. Some of it is downright simple, like identifying human body parts like the head, shoulders, knees, and toes... identifying components of a computer like keyboard, monitor, mouse. This one is funny... start and shut down basic technology like computers, tape recorders, VCRs. What child of today that isn't either impoverished or Amish doesn't know how to use that stuff? My daughter has been able to find her favorite TV shows on the Tivo for a year now, lol. Since we're in the big time now, I suppose I should go through this and make sure that she knows everything in it by the end of the year. I can already check off most of it.

Dd will still be on her summer vacation until September 5th. Last year we started on August 22 and finished on May 10th. So we've been on break for a while. But don't think that we've been slacking. Just today, we practiced one-to-one correspondence, music (sang three songs), read several sentences, drew pictures, categorized pictures as to whether they belonged in the sky, land, or water, wrote the numbers from 36 to 40, figured out how many dimes we'd need to pay for things, matched upper and lowercase letters, found hidden pictures, and figured out the beginning sounds for pictures. This is our vacation schedule!

So while we, as a homeschooling family, might be playing at the pool while all of her peers are in school, I shouldn't feel too guilty, because learning gets done even in the summer. And in a few weeks we'll be studying our six subjects a day just like everyone else. But then again, it only takes a few hours a day to do all our work, so you might find us out at the pool anyway.

I love being able to homeschool. Which is a good thing, because I'm not just playing homeschool any more.