Logan, age 12, took a band class at the middle school. He LOVED it. I LOVED it. It was an all around win-win, and we're doing it again this coming year. I can't say enough good things about dual enrolling for this class. I'm so glad we made that jump.
Annie was a full time 5th grader at the elementary school. This is a terrible picture of her, but it accurately shows how she felt about it... most of the time.
Abby was a full time kindergartener at the elementary school. She smiled like this for the first two days. After that, the honeymoon was over! Ha ha! (See the bags under her eyes? This girl did not have enough sleep all year!)
Alex homeschooled full time. He had no complaints.
Now to share our experience this year. At the beginning of the year, we enrolled Logan in band which was a very new step for us, but also something we'd been considering for a long time. Since we'd moved into town and now lived so close to the school it became a real possibility. At the same time we encountered some heavy challenges that required a lot more time from me. It became quickly apparent that I didn't have the time to take care of everything that was needful. So we took it to the Lord. I didn't expect the answer we received, and I certainly wasn't looking for it, but we were guided to put Annie and Abby into public school for the year. In this way, my time would be freed up enough to take care of everything that was needful.
Annie was excited and nervous to go to school, Abby was all excitement, and I was a crying mess. The first few weeks of school were really hard for Annie. She'd never been in a public classroom before and adjusting to that environment was rather overwhelming. Every day for the first three weeks, she spent her evenings at home crying, and would wake up crying in the mornings. It wasn't that the work was too hard. It was that she wasn't used to having such a long regimented day, doing worksheet after worksheet after worksheet, and rarely having a break. She only had 20 minutes for lunch, and one 20 minute recess each day.
After the first month, she adjusted and became an excellent student. As far as public school standards go, she was extremely successful. She rounded out the year as the top speller and one of the top math students in her class. Her teacher enjoyed her because she was helpful and kind. She made friends with several nice girls. She had some neat opportunities including an overnight winter camping experience (see the picture below) and choir performances.
BUT she was bored out of her mind. The math was stuff she learned in 2nd grade, the literature was WAY below her level, and the worksheets which she had to spend so much time on provided very little in the way of learning. She was exhausted and grumpy all week. She didn't have time at home to study things that she was interested in, to read, or to socialize. Surprisingly, she had WAY less social time as a public schooler than she typically had as a homeschooler. That really shocked me!
There were definitely a lot of negatives in her year at PS, but there were also some really important positives. Annie is a really smart, talented, responsible girl. She is sweet, kind, and helpful. However, prior to this year, her time management skills were terrible, and her confidence in certain academic areas was poor. This made some aspects of homeschooling really hard with her. This year she learned to stand on her own two feet, she gained tons of confidence in her abilities, and she learned to manage her time. I really feel that the Lord lined things up for us this year so that she could gain those important lessons even though she had to make some big sacrifices.
(This picture is from Annie's 5th grade graduation. She is with her teacher who really was a good teacher, even though I was so sad it wasn't me. I was actually very impressed with all of the teachers and staff that I met at their school.)
Abby loved her first two days of school. On the third day she asked me what we were doing 'tomorrow'. So I told her she was going to school. Then she asked what we were doing the day after that. I told her she was going to school. I think that's when she really understood that she was going to go to school every day. She cried and told me she didn't want to go! She mostly enjoyed the first semester, though. She's a really sweet social little thing, and she liked being with kids all day. Her teacher also did a lot of educational activities that felt more like play. I appreciated that. She had a really sweet young teacher. Abby adored her. She did complain at home that they didn't do any math in school. They only taught numbers in kindergarten, and she wanted to work problems. So I sometimes gave her problems to work at home. Ha ha!
Abby was on the brink of reading when we enrolled her. Unfortunately, the methods used in the school set her several steps backward and confused her. I teach reading by using phonics, but the school was relying heavily on sight words. She's a smart little thing, and soon figured it out for the most part, though. I've had to fight to convince her that reading isn't just memorizing words, and that she can read any word by sounding it out. She seems to believe me now (usually), and is almost a fluent reader. (Hallelujah!)
The hardest thing for Abby about being in school was that she was so exhausted all the time. We put her to bed nice and early every night, but she could never settle down to sleep right away (she's always been that way). She was extremely grumpy ALL year. My sweet happy little girl only emerged on Sundays when she'd had the benefit of a restful Saturday and two restful nights. Waking her up in the morning was a nightmare. I had to carry her out of her room and dress her myself if we had any chance of making the bus in time. By the second semester, she'd fight me every morning and tell me that she wanted to homeschool again. I was really happy to let her sleep once the school year was over! She also started acting out in class during the second semester. She is my most strong willed and sassy child, and she showed it. I made a comment to her teacher one day about her being strong willed, and her teacher in good humor commented that she'd noticed. She didn't misbehave every day, but about once a week she'd decide that she wasn't interested in listening to the teacher or in following the rules.
At home, we had a lot of positives. It was really quiet and easy to only have four kids at home. Being down two kids made a HUGE difference in the noise level and in my demands. I've determined that Abby and Annie are at the root of most of the noise in our house. They are my big talkers and the ones who interact with their siblings the most. Ha ha! I was able to give Logan and Alex so much one on one time that they needed from me this year, and that was a huge blessing. I was also able to step back from our craziness to see what changes I needed to make to our homeschool routines. I don't think I could have been able to see where to make changes if I'd been in the muddle of homeschooling everyone and dealing with the challenges we had this year. I feel like I now know how to structure our time to be more successful this year.
Being able to see what public school was like for my kids also renewed my confidence in homeschooling. We'd had three rough years previously. I wasn't feeling very confident that those homeschooling years had been successful, and I was starting to doubt that what we'd been doing was working. So it was encouraging to see that Annie and Abby were both ahead of the game academically when put into PS. As I gained a feel for the academics that they were doing in their classrooms, my confidence in homeschooling grew and grew.
It's hard to decided what the hardest part of PS was for me. It's probably a three way tie between the schedule, the social garbage my girls brought home, and the way it so greatly reduced our family time. I've been struggling with my physical health over the last couple of years, and I really need adequate sleep to feel okay. So the schedule was really hard on me. I really needed a couple more hours of sleep each morning when my alarm went off. By most afternoons, a deep fatigue (sick not sleepy) would set in because I hadn't had enough sleep, but I couldn't take a nap because it was always right before the girls got home. Once they were home, they needed at least an hour to unwind. Then it was dinner time, evening activities and chores, and then bedtime. I couldn't get enough rest all year.
Abby experienced some sexual harassment in school. She repeated a couple of very inappropriate behaviors at home, and then explained that some boys had done those things to her. She hadn't told her teacher, and hadn't thought to tell us until we questioned what was going on. We were very unsettled that these things happened in Kindergarten! She also came home with a lot of attitudes and bad ideas that she'd picked up on from other kids.
Annie had good friends at school, but she internalized a lot of gossipy attitudes from other kids. She started treating her brothers like she was better than they were, and stereotyping people (i.e. the good kids, the bad kids, the stupid kids, etc.). She also started worrying a lot about being made fun of even though she wasn't a target. I was really surprised when I attending the winter camp with her at how withdrawn she was around her school peers. She's always been very outgoing, friendly, and chatty. She was extremely guarded because she was worried from the way she'd seen kids treating each other. It made me really sad.
Whenever we had positive learning experiences at home or we had field trips I really missed my girls. I felt sad every single time I put them on the bus, and I wanted to cry every time I walked into their school. We felt so incomplete without them all year. They eventually started to feel a little like outsiders to our family group, and that really unsettled me.
In the evenings when Jim was home, we had way less time as a family than we were used to. We've had the same bedtime for our kids since Logan and Annie were babies, but on a homeschooling schedule we always had the freedom to fudge it a little in favor of family time. Typically, the kids would go to bed on time 3-4 nights out of the school week, and we'd have 1-2 nights that they'd stay up a little later so we could have family time. We couldn't do that this year. Annie and Abby were too exhausted all the time for us to fudge bedtime. We had to be really strict about it, and that meant that we had many nights without any family time. In addition, the girls didn't get home until 4pm and they needed time to unwind from their day, do homework (if they had any), and do their daily chores. That time always looked like loud chaos and it usually overlapped with when Jim came home. Good quality family time couldn't happen when things were so chaotic. On a homeschool schedule, all of the kids and I have had time to unwind and complete chores/ schoolwork by the time Jim gets home, so good quality family time can start as soon as he arrives.
On the last day of school I was giddy with excitement. It was my birthday, and as my gift I was going to get ALL of my kids home again! I really missed my girls during their year at PS. It was important that we sent them, and there were some valuable lessons learned. I don't want to discount that. I know it was what we needed to do. However, as we've been together all summer, I've had this strong feeling that being all together every day is so very right for our family. It feels so good and right, even though parenting is much more difficult when everyone is home.
As we've considered our upcoming school year, we've made it a matter of much prayer to determine what we need to do. Even with all of the negatives from PS last year, it was a really hard decision this time. There is a big part of me that wants to let someone else have the responsibility of teaching my children academics, and there is another big part that is still struggling with confidence in my own abilities. The last few years have been tough on me in many ways and I'm not the super confident person I used to be. I don't have the great health I used to have. At the same time, I so strongly don't want our family to go through the negatives that we experienced last year, and I do want all of the incredible blessings that can come from homeschooling. All of my kids want to homeschool as well.
When I was working on the decision, I made a list of pros and cons for homeschooling. I easily came up with dozens of pros, but I had difficulty coming up with cons. Once I finished my list, I realized that most of my cons were 'what ifs'; only a couple were concrete negatives. That list showed me that, for our family, homeschooling is what we need spiritually, academically, emotionally, and socially. After that experience, the Lord blessed me with a few more sweet experiences that confirmed our path to homeschool again this year. Annie and Logan will be dual enrolled so that they can be in the excellent band program at the middle school, but we will be homeschooling for everything else. I am grateful. I'm terrified and worn out at times, but I am truly grateful to know that this is the path the Lord would have us on, and so happy that we will be together every day. I am so blessed.
(Here we are all together! We celebrated the end of the school year/ start of summer by sleeping in and having ice cream and brownies for breakfast. This picture makes me cry because I feel so much happiness at having my children all home again.)
