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I just got off the phone with a representative from the home school association that we have decided to go through. The application is on its way! Hurrah!
I had a conference with Buttercup’s current teacher this morning, and I really like her. When we discussed the progress report, it turned out that our girly isn’t failing, like the report showed, but that it was skewed. I found out that my daughter hadn’t been completely transferred from her last class room and her grades hadn’t caught up with her.
I found out that neither teacher, the old or the new, knew why Buttercup had been transferred to a new class. There was a lot of really screwy administrative stuff going on, and both of us were hedging around things- I didn’t want to get into why we had demanded the transfer, and the teacher didn’t want to say anyone had fallen down on the job.
At any rate, despite the fact that I really, really like Buttercup’s new teacher, there’s still enough going on that I am going to take her out of school.
Besides, as much as I thought I’d like not homeschooling the kids anymore, I’ve found I don’t like not homeschooling them more. (Trust me, that sentence makes sense.)
I’ve now finished putting together my order for her new books and test materials. (Yay!) It came to…ouch… $187.00 That doesn’t count some materials I already had on hand, and some stuff I have on order through BAM.
We’ll be pulling Buttercup as soon as she gets her next report card in 2 weeks.
While I’m waiting for the paperwork to come from the association, I went ahead and bought some books at BAM, put one on order, and set up a wishlist through CBD. Then I dug through the closet and found some 3rd grade text books that I used when I was home schooling my darling son. Already having the teacher’s guide to the Saxon Math program is going to save me some green stuff!
Besides the school books, we found a book for the Homeschooling Father, which my husband bought for himself. I can’t remember the exact title, and he took it to work with him, but it’s nice to have so much support from him.
I’ve also started setting up Buttercup’s classroom. I wish I’d been this organized the last time I home schooled- it likely would have gone better. When my daughter woke up this morning she found her own little workspace set up with a desk to use. She was so excited by it she didn’t want to go to school, and insisted on eating her breakfast at the desk.
I’m basically just going to ignore the work she did at the beginning of this year and start her over again. At this point, with the grades she got at the beginning of the year, however well she does now, she’ll still have to repeat the year, so what’s the point? Besides, I want to make certain sure she didn’t miss anything fundamental where she has been having such a hard time.
First off there was the problem of her grades. Buttercup had been a straight A+ student when we home schooled her before. Now she’s pulling failing grades.
I get notes and suggestions and demands to do more with her at home, but she comes home exhausted every day, and we do school work until supper, and sometimes after, every day. With the amount of extra she supposedly needs, I might as well just home school her, where she can have 1 on 1 teaching time every day, all day.
Second are her food intolerance issues. She has trouble saying no to things she really shouldn’t have, not to mention she has to be excluded from a lot of school craft and science projects because they are food based. Because we don’t have an official doctor’s diagnosis (complicated issue there, I’ll explain some other time) the school officials seem to think I’m over-reacting about the food. (But let me tell you, I don’t think I’m over-reacting when I’m scrubbing vomit off the walls or soothing her when she has a pedi-migraine or body pain after an exposure.)
Cross contamination is a huge issue as well. Since we are intolerant to wheat, there’s the lovely fact that if, say, someone has been using wheat flour in a project, the stuff floats in the air for 48 hours before settling. At every breath she’s ingesting it. The school principal said to me, “everything we do is food related!” and she wasn’t kidding. (No wonder so many of the kids around here are obese.)
Actually, there’s a huge amount of insensitivity toward my Buttercup that I just can’t fathom. Like today, she gets off the bus in tears because her pack was too heavy. She weighs about 50 lbs, has scoliosis (we are waiting til she’s a little older and then she’s scheduled to be put in a back-brace to help straighten her spine) and I took her pack and could tell it was heavy. Out of curiosity I went and put it on the bathroom scale to see it weighed 25 lbs. She had been given her sick brother’s homework to carry home as well.
Not only was this hard for her, but when she got off the bus, the driver yells out the door to me, “She was fine on the bus and now she’s being a big baby?” Buttercup answered back, “I was sitting down! It didn’t hurt when I was sitting down!”
There have been times when she’s been very sick and had to go to the nurse, and the school never called me.
Even if she were making everything up (which I don’t think she is), she is still clearly miserable at school.
Third is the bullying. She’s ok when her big brother is with her, but he’s not with her all the time. She’s tiny compared to the other kids in her class, and well-behaved. She’s a target for meanness.
I honestly haven’t begun to list everything that’s been bad with this school for her. I’m totally confused as to why her experience has been so miserable, and her brother, with many of the same issues, has been thriving. But I want what is best for her academically, emotionally, and physically.
Well…
After several months in public school, we’ve decided it is time to pull the girl out and home school her. Again.
Since my friend, Tulip, is also on a similar journey, I thought I’d follow her lead and start a blog over here to chart our own progress. (These blogs are pretty! I like the lay out. Plus, I don’t have to keep signing out of my current LJ account to sign into another LJ account.)
When I’m feeling a little less overwhelmed and exhausted and stressed out, I’ll write a little more about why we’ve decided to home school the munchkin again.
Now I have to start the fun of making calls to the home school association to enroll her.
Thanks for riding along with me,
Meadowsweet
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Where we chart the progress of life, the universe, and everything.
