A Decision

Yesterday, I took one step closer to rescuing the kids from the evil clutches of the public school system. After much deliberation and extensive research, I have decided on a small non-denomination Christian school which essentially does all the dirty work of home schooling. They keep the records, report to the state, provide the curriculum, grade the tests, and provide support in many, many ways. If I need a little help getting my kids, shall we say, motivated, the "principal" is available to assist with scaring them straight. After two hours in her office, I found a lot of reasons to really like the woman in charge.

During my time at the school office, I was able to get a close look at the different sets of curriculum for the kids. Kindergarten uses a set by Horizon and focuses on Language Arts and Math for the school year. There are activities and great books called Little Readers to encourage comprehension and literacy. By following the Teacher's Manual step by step, a child using this program would be reading in 4 months. I think that's fantastic! In grades 1 through 12, the curriculum by LifePac is used and provides study in Language Arts, Math, History and Geography, Science, and the Bible. Each of the four 'core' subjects integrates the Bible into it's lessons so the kids get a strong foundation. I can't complain about that!

In all, school time should be about 2 hours for Kindergarten and 4 to 5 hours for the other grades each day. For grades 3 and up, the subjects can be taken and studied online using Switched on School, a curriculum that practically mirrors LifePac. The school even sells the science experiment packages for the year for extremely reasonable prices. They've literally thought of everything....including school t-shirts and field trips!

So, all of this is fantastic.....but I still feel a little, well, ready to pee my pants from nervousness. What if I don't do enough for the kids? What if I'm terrible at 'teaching' and the kids end up with the intelligence level of an uneducated pot smoker? I suppose the only way I'll ever know if I'm good at this is to jump in head first. No dipping the toes. No wading in. Just pull the kids out this Friday before the week long break and let them start back up with me afterwards. Sigh.....this is a good decision, right?