Homeschooling The Pack

Month 1-
It's gone by so fast I totally didn't realize I'd not talked to other family members outside this house in a month. My poor grandmother probably thinks I hate her. :( Not contacting her through all the commotion was NOT intentional, but now I'm scared to call her out of complete fear of a Jewish guilt trip.....


Valentines day was the official last day of traditional public school for my kids.
After a bitch-fest battle with the principal and the school district, and feeling like I was stripped of my rights as a parent everytime my children stepped foot on their campus, my children started becoming treated horribly.
I decided they weren't going to get $30/day for each one of my brood.
My initial reaction was to transfer them to another school. I went through the process of interviewing different principals at other schools, found one I was willing to transfer them to, and was told there was enough room for all of them.
After putting in the transfer request (immediately after looking at the class lists and how many were in each class which prompted the request forms), I waited for a few days to hear back. I was told the school didn't have room for my Kinder. My husband and I found this laughable because we realized the principal at the current school tried to make it so we'd need to take the older kids to that school, then find a different school to enroll our Kinder, to make things harder on us.
What the district wasn't expecting, was that my husband's brain was conjuring up the idea to take them out of the district completely, and homeschool them.

Well upon receiving the crackpot news that there suddenly wasn't room for my Kinder, and my 2nd grader saying the staff at the current school were mean to him (he was lashing out in class at this point because of frustration, but no one told us the reasons prior to this) the enrollment process was started with the virtual academy program.

This has been a learning process for all of us. Frustration has been evident, but it's not enough to send them back to the school that didn't care. (I'd rather have a few hours of chewing my nails than possibly have my kids think I didn't care about their well being while under the supervision of adults I don't particularly trust.) We're all still learning how to use the website and getting the hang of what needs to be prepared in advance for what lesson, but we are all thriving and working together as a team.
Even my 2nd grader's foul attitude he felt he was forced to have because of school has changed.

We were sent a brand new desktop computer, and all of the curriculum in neatly organized boxes.
They do online and offline schoolwork. Every Monday morning they have what's called a "Weekly Wake Up" session that gets them back into the swing of things after the weekend.
An average school day has a minimum of 4 hours, and this needs to be achieved by 11:59pm every night.
If this is done at a reasonable time every day, we have the rest of the day to do whatever we want. I will still try to sneak in some "offline" lessons, like taking them to the store and having them figure out what goes in the dinner recipes, and how to make change.
They have mandatory testing, they have to do in another town, and we meet with the "homeroom" teacher, Mrs. Duffy regularly to turn in work samples (to prove they're actually doing the work lol)
My 4th grader has a new-found love for science, though. She didn't get to do compost experiments or make ecosystems with bugs and flowers out of old milk cartons while she was in regular school.

The biggest frustration we've had is knowing they're basically re-doing the grade levels they're in because we enrolled them so late in the year.


I hear "But mommy, I already know this stuff..." quite a bit.



We'll be working through the summer to get them completely caught up to the next grade, but the review is NOT a bad thing.