One Week Down and About 39 More to Go

We had a wonderful first week! I may sound overly positive, but I’ve never used the words “wonderful” and “first week” together before. Usually it’s “good,” “survived,” or “somewhat productive.” But we actually had a wonderful first week.

With the exception of Thursday, which in itself was a lesson learned, we accomplished everything we set out to accomplish each day. The first two days we the boys did half of their lessons, Meme did nearly a whole day of school, and we figured out what Jojo can and can’t do in the morning. She can’t read in bed, because she simply falls asleep, but she’s not yet awake enough to do math.

Wednesday and Friday we did even more. The boys completed a full day’s worth of lessons, and Meme started stepping up and getting more done.

Jojo is still finding her own pace. She hasn’t been feeling well for months and months, with non-specific symptoms. The doctors haven’t managed to find anything, although she’s had a great many tests run on her. She’s starting to feel better, but neither her appetite nor her energy level has returned to normal. She’s a hard worker, but during the last few months, she gets overwhelmed easily.

It was a big accomplishment for her that she stayed awake during school hours all week, eat something at each mealtime, and actually get some schoolwork done. It’s a start, and I’m confident that she’ll return back to her normal, energetic self.

Jojo is technically my only homeschooler. By using K12, the other three are technically public school students. Only technically though. Believe me when I say that I have more interaction in their day to day studies while on K12 than I did when they were “homeschoolers.” Especially with the younger grades, K12 is very parent involved.

Other people have said this about me, but I don’t see how some families with multiple young children can do it. Mine are spaced perfectly apart for using K12. Meme is pretty much self-directed.  The only thing I do is look over her progress and push her back on the path with the subjects she tries to avoid. With Bobo and Ebby, it’s all ME.

Bobo is not reading fluently enough to understand the directions, and Ebby doesn’t read. We’re working out a good system. Most of Ebby’s classes take a few minutes for him to do.  We alternate between a Bobo class and an Ebby class. Bobo will generally do his off-line worksheets while Ebby does his on-line classes.

Then in the late afternoon, when Ebby is done, I have Jojo read to him or sit with him, while Bobo and I get 45 minutes to an hour by ourselves to do language arts.  My hope is that by the time Ebby’s work is actually challenging to him, Bobo will be reading well enough to do some things without my direct help.

My biggest worry right now is that my enthusiasm and dedication will fail.  It’s not a worry ungrounded in reality. Most years start off great, and then I get frustrated at the stubbornness of the children to do their schoolwork, the time it takes and everything else.  Once I’m frustrated, it’s only a matter of time before I start slowing down and letting things slide.

I’m determined not to have this happen this year. Part of that plan is being realistic in what we can do during the day.  I need to remember that homeschooling my children is my job. It’s okay if I can’t clean house, do laundry or cook during school hours. And if something has to slide, those things should be first.

For class planning: Meme and the boys have their classes planned and laid out for them – that’s the benefit of using the system.

Jojo, however, we’re still working on this year’s “class schedule.” She gets the flexibility that a system like K12 or Connections Academy won’t have, but we have to do all the planning.

We sat down yesterday to look through the curricula I have for high school, and of course I’m like a kid in a candy store. “You should do this class.” “Oh and this class is really important.”

She just sits back quietly; after all she knows me well. After I’ve filled a page with a long list of classes I want her to work on, I turn to her and say, “I’ve gone overboard again, haven’t I?”

“Yes, Mom,” she replies in her patient tone, “you have.” We sat the project aside so that I can clear my head, and we’re working on it this weekend.

Literature she has in the bag. She is one of the most well read kids that I know for her age. Only Algernon had read more books by this time, and Algernon is a prodigy with literature and reading.

I have the writing program that I used. It’s old, but it’s good. She started it about a month ago, and it’s working really well. So we’ll stick with that.

For math, we have a good solid plan for. Our plan: do it everyday. It may not seem like much, but it should do the trick.

Now here’s where I get overly enthusiastic.

Social studies. She really should have civics; as an adult I see the importance of it. Then world geography is important. We are more global now than we have ever been, so it is more important for emerging adults to know about the world and cultures. And economics. Seriously, how many of us would have benefited greatly if we had gone into adulthood knowing a bit more about personal economics. Then I found this great curriculum that teaches basic life skills. It’s actually called Discovering Life Skills. It teaches all those little things that most of us had to learn the hard way.

You see why it is wonderful that Jojo is so patient with me. I get like this every year. She let it run its course, and that’s about when we put things away.

We settled on:

·         Finding a science curriculum that she can work with. She hates science, and I think it’s only because it’s never been presented to her in the right way.

·         Limit social studies to one at a time. She may be able to do multiple ones this year, but not all at once.

·         Start some sort of test prep. Her eligibility to get TOPS (Louisiana’s general scholarship) is based solely on her ACT scores. The better she does, the more she gets.

·         Pick a foreign language and find a systematic curriculum to use. I think we’re about settled on German.

 
I have my homework for this weekend laid out. By Monday, I’m hoping we have a solid plan of action and that I still have the enthusiasm to push through until it’s not as exhausting.

Getting Sorted

I knew going into this adventure that the first few weeks getting started would be hard, but I thought it would all be on my end. Since this is LaVCA’s first year, they too are having a good bit of growing pains.

Meme and Jojo took their assessment tests. Jojo, like anything I ask her these days, replied “I don’t know” to the question of how she did. Meme, never very forthcoming with the words, didn’t say much, but I overheared her tell her best friend that she failed the unfailable test. 

Supposedly, as soon as the child is finished taking the test, the scores are sent to the teacher, who reviews them and comes up with an ILP (Individualized Learning Plan). 

I figured that I would hear from the teachers in a couple of days post-test.  Silly me. All these teachers have pretty much been in training meetings for the last two weeks. Top that off with every child being new in LaVCA this year (since it’s year one), so every ILP has to be made from scratch.

So my anxiety doth run over my cup. I know I fret, but I had a major fret episode. Yesterday, Friday, I finally couldn’t take it anymore. I called both Meme’s and Jojo’s teachers, left a message on their voicemail (they were in another meeting) and waited.

Meme’s teacher called back a couple of hours later. Of course, I’ve been trying to convince K12 that she needs to be in seventh grade, despite her age. We have not yet done seventh grade work with her, and I don’t think she could handle eighth grade work.

Well, she actually did okay on the assessment test. Compared to other eighth grade students, Meme’s on the high end of average for reading comprehension and just below average in math. Considering that we haven’t yet gotten to sixth or seventh grade math, that’s not bad. And since she didn’t start reading until she was 9, being on the high end of average for other eighth grades is pretty good.

Her teacher and I talked for while, discussing what this means. One of my worries is that she won’t be able to handle the eighth grade work in science and history. The teacher said that since her reading comprehension is fairly high, all things considered, and since science and history are all based on reading stuff and understanding that stuff, she can do the work. That does make sense.

We agreed to keep her in the eighth grade. In a weird way this means that she’s skipping a grade simply for the fact that we haven’t done anything for seventh grade. Oh well, it’s all subjective anyway.  She still needs a bit of remediation in math, but not as much as I thought.  She may need some extra help in writing as well, but the teacher’s philosophy is that if she’s reading on that level, she can emulate what she reads and write on that level too.

 

Meme is actually pleased with herself.  So I can officially call her an eighth grader now.

The Ball is in My Court

I received an e-mail from K12 with instructions for the assessment tests for Jojo and Meme. They are taking them tomorrow, and I’m down-playing it so that they won’t be nervous. 

I looked through Meme’s language arts text book, and it doesn’t look that bad.  And the reading books (Diary of Anne Frank, Romeo & Juliet and Fredrick Douglas’s writings), they’re certainly right around the level of books I’ve been assigning her for the last year.

It certainly looks doable for Meme.

I don’t know. Maybe I’m not such an utter failure as a homeschool mom. (I gotta love these pep talks I give myself).

A Very Painful Day

Once in my twenties while I was still nursing Meme, I had a cavity that needed filling.  As most nursing moms know, we generally don’t stop breastfeeding simply because some dentist tells us that breastfeeding and dental anesthesia don’t combine well. “Can’t the kid take a bottle?” is not acceptable.  I hated dental anesthesia anyway, so I decided that it would be fine to have the tooth drilling done without any pain meds. None at all. Not even a Tylenol. And yes, it did hurt. Quite a bit.

I would gladly take the pain from that day over the pain I felt yesterday afternoon trying to guide Jojo through the LEAP. It’s not that she can’t do the work. She is capable, but does she know that? I don’t know, but she acts like she doesn’t.

I thought after the success from the day before, Jojo would be less anxious. She should have felt more at ease from knowing that this test-taking stuff is within her realm of capability. The reading passages aren’t hard, and she had no problem understanding either the passages or the questions.  A greater familiarity with the test format should have made her more comfortable. I figured that we were ready to take a real life-sized language arts portion pretest and use the results to hone her skills.

Yet, she began with the attitude that she’s going to fail, and I don’t understand why she should feel that way. Test anxiety doesn’t sum it up, at least not fully.

Our work session yesterday didn’t start out well. I guess I forgot to tell her the day before, when explaining the LEAP and why she had to take it, that it wasn’t an on-line test that would take an hour or two.  I suppose I forgot to mention that it was a three day, written test she would have to take at a school in mid-city with a bunch of other kids.

“But it’s on-line!” she insisted.

“No hun, the Connections Academy’s assessment test is on-line.  The Louisiana LEAP is a state test; it has to be supervised by actual teachers and stuff.”

That look she gave me I mistakenly saw as sarcastic indignation.  You know, one of those looks of “Are you f***ing kidding me?”  But it turned out to be a look of pure panic and terror. My bad, but I won’t confuse the two looks again.

On a mildly related note, for the last three days while I’ve been working with Jojo, the boys have been exceptionally good. Maybe it’s the semi-clean state of the playroom, which is now messy enough that it should have caution tape around it.  Maybe it’s the extra sleep they are getting, but giving me 3 to 4 hour chunks to work with one of their sisters is a gift from them.

Back to yesterday: While the boys were occupied, I was puttering around the dining room just in case Jojo, who was at the dining room table, had a question. Just a little bit of light sewing so that I didn’t seem so engrossed in helping her, but it kept me near enough that she could feel comfortable asking me anything. Quietly she read the first passage.

“I don’t understand this question.” Now that look I should have recognized. Anger. Self-righteousness.  Sometimes my own naivety surprised me, but I thought she really didn’t understand the question.

“What’s the question?” I asked as I hopped up, possibly a bit too enthusiastically.

“What’s the point of this passage?” I was ready with my stock answer that the point of a passage is generally summed up in the first and last paragraphs, so let’s take a look at those.

“No mom,” she said with dead calm. “I understand the article. I just felt it was pointless.”

Okay.  There’s no stock answer for that. It didn’t get any prettier from there.

I just didn’t recognize all the signs of frustration and being overwhelmed.  We’ve had a weird view of schooling for the most part. I figure if the kids are really good readers and can do adequate math that they should be fine. After all, if you can read well then you can learn to do anything else. I push loads of good books at them and have them do their math work consistently. I have them write practical things like stories, letters and such.

Maybe I haven’t prepared them enough for standardized tests, but there wasn’t anything in these tests that she can’t do – except the test itself. 

Let’s just sum up the next hour with tears from us both, yelling from her, almost giving up (both of us again) and other unpleasant things. Towards the end, she was determined not to do the test for no other reason than the principle of it, but I was still determined that she does it.

If my children learn no other lesson from me I hope it’s that you don’t ever give up until you’ve really tried. 

I tried several tactics to convince her. She tried several tactics to convince me. Finally I reminded her that it’s only been a bit over 3 years since she started reading at all.

“No mom, it’s been 5.” Always the need to correct me. *sigh*

“No, I remember being pregnant with Ebby doing flash card with you in our old kitchen. I remember still doing the flash cards when he was a baby in the sling. And I remember you throwing a book across the room saying that you’ll never be able to read it, so why bother trying.  I remember the book.  It was the shorter, thinner Dick and Jane book with the brown cover. Do you remember that?”

I got a smile from her at least. “Yeah, I remember.”

“Can you read it now?”

“It’s way too easy to read now.”

“But you remember how that felt? And you remember we worked through it.” By then my bladder was screaming obscenities at. When I was washing my hands, I saw myself in the bathroom mirror, and I thought, “How did I come to this place? I’ve ruined my children’s lives by doing this, by homeschooling.”

By the time I got back to the dining room, she had finished writing the answers to that question and the next one. I looked over what she wrote, was satisfied and then went back to sewing.  I sat down with her several more times to explain things, look over her work and talk about stuff, but I’m hoping she worked a little more past her fear.

Today we took it easy and I gave her a bunch of workbook pages on punctuation and other grammar bits.  Of course she informed me that not only had she done these workbook pages before, but that she’s done much better ones. “You need the review,” I told her.

Tomorrow we start on the math portion. I still don’t know how we’re going to squeeze all this studying in and do everything else we have planned. Maybe some creative shuffling is in order.  

I haven’t even started the essay writing section, and I know she’ll freak out despite not being a bad writer. I figure the old 5-paragraph essay I learned in tenth grade English should do the trick. It will at least give her a concrete formula and framework to work with.

If I survive next month . . . I deserve a cookie!

More LEAP'ing

Day 1 of the really serious prep for the LEAP test. From Barnes & Nobles last night, I bought two seriously thick books - $26 bucks each!  One focuses on language arts and the other on math, and both are specifically for the Louisiana LEAP test.

I know that saying “Louisiana LEAP” is redundant in terms of the Louisiana part, but I utterly confused a Connections Academy customer service rep yesterday when asking if incoming freshman had to take the LEAP. You see, Connections Academy has its own LEAP test. So we went round and round for several minutes before we both figured out that we were talking about two different things.

Me: Just got a letter today for my daughter Jojo saying that she’ll have to take the LEAP in order to register as a freshman.

Her: Oh no, she doesn’t have to take the LEAP, but it does help us place her where she should be (don’t you love that phrase “where they should be”?). You can even take it on-line.

Me: Actually I looked it up on-line, and it’s only being offered once this summer, and there’s no make-up date. I don’t know how she would take it on-line. Do you proctor one specifically for Connection Academy’s student?

Her (sounding a bit indignant): Did you find that on our website?

Me: It’s not on your website. I found that on the Louisiana Department of Education’s website. I think they would have more current info on the LEAP.

Her: Give me a minute. . .

We eventually sorted it out and realized that Connections has an assessment test that they call LEAP. Confusing, isn’t it? So if I’m redundant in writing about Louisiana’s LEAP test, that’s why.