Wednesday, July 01, 2009

Where do people find the time

to homeschool. We homeschooled for 1.5 school years. It was fun and fruitful when we were actually schooling, but things were always coming up. The main problem was/is my toddler. She is, shall we say, very active. It was one thing when she napped twice a day, but when she went to one nap, our uninterrupted school time dropped precipitously. If we missed a day due to relatives visiting, illness, doctor appointment etc., we had a hard time making it up.

Then, in October of last year, my mother was diagnosed with a brain tumor while on vacation and had emergency brain surgery in Kalispell, MT. So a solid three weeks of being hysterical with worry and flying back and forth from Kalispell made me despair of ever getting anywhere with school.

I remembered a school I'd checked out when Mia was 4 or 5, but she hadn't been ready for a full day program. But she's matured a lot in the intervening years and they had an opening, so she started in January. It's a small school with about 18 first through sixth graders in one classroom. There is one teacher and one aide for the 18 kids, so she gets a lot of individual attention and can work at her level in each subject without leaving the classroom. The public school wanted to pull her out of class several times a week for this and that. The school preserves many of the things I liked about homeschooling, but stuff actually gets done.

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