Our School Year: Take 2

We've had a big shift in our schooling scenario, so I should probably bring you all up to speed on what's going on here in the mire.

The day has finally come that I NEVER thought I would see (and frankly, hoped not to see).  All of my children (Ivy excepted) are in public school.  It makes me both sick and excited at the same time.

First, Violet is in the same preschool she has been in all year - no change there.  It is the local school district preschool, meets once a week, and is very fun and low key and play-based.  She enjoys going and I like her teachers - two thumbs up.  If it ain't broke, don't fix it!

Next, Henry has been withdrawn from our local school and has been enrolled in a free public virtual school.  I didn't really like Henry's kindergarten class from day 1, but at first he was having a good time and so that was good enough for me.  At five years old, I'm not too concerned about academics, I just want him to have fun learning.  But as the year went on, the newness wore off, and the schoolwork was continually not very challenging, Henry began to loathe going.  And as a person who never liked the school to begin with, I had a very hard time forcing him to go.  I can put the smack down and be firm with my kids when it is something I believe in, but forcing him to go to a boring school every day just for the sake of attendance really rubbed me the wrong way.  So I let him stay home.  Often.  That was kind of our compromise.  He didn't have to go every day, but he did have to go fairly regularly.  It worked for us until January when the principal threatened to turn me in for educational neglect.  I just cracked up over that one!  He had finished the end of the year objectives a couple of months into the school year and wasn't learning anything new most days and I'M the one who is neglecting his education?  She informed me that he had missed approximately 40% of the school days so far and she was concerned that it was detrimental to his education.  I informed HER that if he can miss 40% of the classes and still master all of the work then there is something SERIOUSLY wrong with how they are running that class.  And I withdrew him.

My hubby is pretty pro-public-school so my compromise with him was that I enrolled Henry in an online virtual public school.

I have heard from many homeschoolers that they really don't like the virtual schools because they aren't very flexible and many people just end up dropping out and homeschooling instead.  Fair enough.  But for us, I think it is the right choice for the rest of this year.  It keeps peace between me and hubby, makes my homeschooling job easier since the lessons are all planned out for me and the supplies are provided, and Henry will be able to work through the coursework as fast as he likes.  No waiting for the rest of the class to "get it" before moving on.  So for now, I think it will work - I'll keep you updated on that one.

Lastly, Mitchell is enrolled in a big fat brick-and-mortar public school (NOT the same school we took Henry out of).  Complete with bells, cafeteria, desks, and a crabby school secretary.  That is a decision I was very torn over.  In a lot of ways, it felt like giving up on him.  I feel like I could have kept homeschooling him, and we could have been successful academically, but the cost to our family dynamic and our relationship troubled me.  In the end we decided to give it a try and just see how it went.  He's been there for two weeks now and so far so good.  The teacher and principal both have been very responsive and seem to be more than willing to try to make the experience a good one for him.  It is a special school-within-a-school program so it has more of the small school feel that we are used to from our former private school.  They also incorporate skill groups and multi-age classrooms to both make sure that kids are getting work at their particular skill level and also to develop a sense of community among all the classes.   For him particularly I also think that the structure will be good.  It is something that is highly recommended for kids with ADHD and something I have absolutely no talent for. I feel like this is something I can live with, at least for now, and it seems like Mitchell can too.

I have no idea where any of the kids will be for school come September, but it feels good to be in a place where it seems like everyone fits.

And... Action!

Today we tried to complete part #2 of the Deep Space Sparkle Winter Trees art project, and thankfully it went much much better than part #1.  It might seem a little crazy to even consider continuing on after our last art debacle, but I figured if we can survive shaving cream without anyone getting strangled, Cray-pas should be no problem.  Turns out I was right. 

To increase our chances of success, we started while the baby was taking one of her rare loooong afternoon naps.  VERY helpful.  But now before I get too far, let me tell you that we did not in fact complete the winter trees.  All those swirly papers are still unadorned.  But something much much better happened.

In an effort to be a little more creative, instead of just saying, "Let's make trees", I asked them what the designs reminded them of.  Violet said swirls (obvious, but no less true), and Henry said wind or waves.  I rolled with the waves thing and showed him how we could make draw fish on construction paper and cut them out to add them to the picture.  He loved it and made a fish of his own, but he couldn't bear to glue them on to the paper.  They were too fun to play with.

Then he had a light-bulb moment. 

"Hey Mom, what we really need is some sticks!  Then it could be a puppet!"

What followed took up our entire afternoon and the swirly papers were forgotten.  I gotta tell you, making stick/paper/Cray-pas puppets is VERY gratifying.  You can get a kick-ass looking puppet made in about five minutes.  So you can imagine the volume of characters and whatnot we were able to make in an afternoon.  I made a bunch myself too because it was just way too fun not to join in.

After we were done creating, they spent a good long while developing a story and practicing it and just having fun.

After dinner Henry and Violet put on their show for the rest of us and I grabbed the video camera and was able to capture a moment (actually about eleven moments) that pretty much summed up all the children's personalities in a nutshell.  There was little plot, but tons of personality, just the way I like it :-)

Ceta-cular!

This week Henry has been showing a sustained interest (read as: asking about it multiple days in a row) in whales.  It started with a picture of mine that I unearthed from one of our moving boxes of a whales tail at sunset.  He was wondering what it was and I told him.  Then he started carrying around the plastic blue whale from our bath toy bin and asking a lot of questions about whales and the ocean as we drove around dropping off Mitch at school and picking him up (Mitch and school is a whole other post I will share later).  Yesterday he was asking a lot of good questions about blue whales.  I knew that blue whales were the biggest animal on earth, but that was about as much as I could tell him.  Most of his other questions I just had to say, "Hmmm.... I'm not sure, that's something we should look up."  So today we started looking them up.  I stumbled upon a fantastic interactive page on the National Geographic website that tells all about blue whales and compares their length and weight to all kinds of fun things like a space shuttle, a T-Rex, and a tank.  We also watched an animation of how whales feed.  There is a lot of fun information on the site and we didn't get to it all so hopefully we will be back another day to learn more (or if he doesn't want to, I'll go on there myself, it's a VERY cool site).

Here are some of my favorite things we learned today:

*A blue whale's heart is about the size of a Mini Cooper!  And if you are particularly agile, it's major arteries are big enough for a person to crawl through.

*A blue whale weighs about the same as 2,660 people.  About 100 people can fit in its mouth.  We had fun talking about who we would have to throw on the scale to reach 2,660 - our church, all our friends, all our family members, his class, Violet's class, Mitchell's class, and still we wouldn't be able to tip the scale our way!


When we were at the Science Museum last we needed to take a little break for Ivy to nurse and then crawl around a bit and found a lovely little book nook to rest in.  While we were resting we read one of the books they had out called "How Whales Walked Into The Sea".  A VERY interesting book that I highly recommend and one that I'm thinking we need to add to our personal collection because I really want to reread it.  Did you know that whales were land animals first?  I didn't until I read that book to Henry.  He and I were both pretty awed.  The natural world is just FULL of truly amazing stuff.