Home schooling was a dream that my husband and I had when we first got married in 1996. I was in college and had just become an LPN and was working toward my RN. As our lives continued to change and develop together, I became very engaged in my career as in ICU nurse and really enjoyed my work. Through many trials and losses, we finally had 2 beautiful children. As they became school-aged, our debt was too great to have me quit my job and it never seemed like an option.
Within the first 4 years of having school-aged children, much had changed. My job changed and we switched daycares for our youngest. Our eyes opened to the possibility of debt free living and within about 9 months that possibility was reality and I resigned from my job as Director of Nursing in a local Assisted Living facility. The talk of home school continued, but we LOVED our Christian School. I'm sure there are others just as fantastic, but ours was incredible. Stirring came and the Lord told me to start packing to move and I had no idea where, but knew it was soon. My husband accepted a new job across the state and that is a story in itself, but we were moving to a new town. I knew at the time we made the decision to move that we would home school in our new location.
We decided to let the children finish the semester at their wonderful school and we moved the week before Christmas. Our school was generous enough to let us take the books with us that the kids were already using. We would keep the workbooks and mail back the text books at the end of this year. I logged in to www.ksde.org and found the tab about homeschooling and followed the instructions. We discussed names and came up with Life Song Academy and I registered our school. We were ready to go! My son is in 3rd grade and my daughter in 1st grade. I planned to follow the calendar of our previous school for the rest of the school year and so on January 2, 2012 Life Song Academy began.
Over the break, in the midst of unpacking, I gathered all of our school books and counted pages and divided all of the remaining work into weekly assignments on my planner Jan 2-6, Language 3 p. 112-114 and so on. I created a sheet to write out daily segments of the work for the kids to use as a plan.
Daily Assignment Sheet Name___________________
Math_________________ Spelling_________________
Reading_______________ Language________________
Other_______________________________________________
Math_________________ Spelling_________________
Reading_______________ Language________________
Other_______________________________________________
Math_________________ Spelling_________________
Reading_______________ Language________________
Other_______________________________________________
Math_________________ Spelling_________________
Reading_______________ Language________________
Other_______________________________________________
Math_________________ Spelling_________________
Reading_______________ Language________________
Other_______________________________________________
I know this is a very simple page, but it works for us and I added the grade-specific subjects on the "other" line. I don't know that I will change this format during this school year, but I write lots of extra stuff in the margins that I have set for 1 inch. The kids highlight or check off their assignments when finished with them and I keep them in my record book in case our files are audited.
I am finding that the kids' daily seat-work is taking 1-2 hours to complete and Kansas has a set amount of days for school if each day is 6 hours or more. Well we don't always make 6 hour days, so I began to keep track of school by the hour. We need 1116 hours per school year. I am discovering, though that we can count Sunday School and Kid's Church and baseball into school hours, so we do. We also watch the History channel and Discovery when the shows are appropriate for education and count those hours or half hours for school as well.
Finally, we needed a way of keeping track of our work and our grades. I played with Excel and couldn't come up with something I liked. I did some searches and downloaded a few templates and my favorite template came from FiveJs.com. It is called Gradebook+ and it meets all of my needs. In the attendance chart, I changed the word "days" to "hours" and type in how many hours we had of school that day. The first worksheet of the Excel document is instructions and they are easy to follow if you are familiar with Excel. I changed the grading scale to be a little more strict than the one provided. I have found that the internet is a fabulous resource not only for the students, but for the parents.
So there is our start up in quite a large nutshell.
So excited for you! Can't wait to read about your journey.
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