My little bird to the rescue

January 25, 2011
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My youngest, D, (a homeschooled kindergartner) goes to our public school every week for a private speech therapy session. Recently we added occupational therapy, after an evaluation determined he has some gross motor skills that need work. He really likes both therapists and the time he has with them one-on-one.


But he really, really likes his speech therapist’s new shiny iPad.

The first time she pulled it out, his mouth fell open. But when she let him use it to practice sounds, he was beyond thrilled (I wasn’t making it up in my review of Talking Tom).

So, now, at the end of each speech therapy session, she gives him a few minutes on the iPad, presumably to let him relax and have a little fun.

But, I know what she’s doing. She let it slip the last time I saw her.

As I entered the school to pick up my little guy, she came down the hall beaming. “How’d he do?”, I asked. “Great!”, she exclaimed and then she brought her voice down a notch and said, “He got me out of a level of Angry Birds! I had been stuck for ages! He told me this was easy and–poof!–done!”

That’s my boy.
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Filed Under: Fairly Odd Kids 8 Comments

Target practice

December 19, 2010


It’s no big secret that I’m not a super-confident homeschooler. Maybe if my kids’ orders had been reversed, I’d be different, but I didn’t get my early reader/early math lover until my third child, leaving me to believe that I absolutely suck at teaching my own kids.


The truth is, kids learn at different rates, and nothing taught me that with more sweaty palms than my oldest needing until she was about seven years old to read a book. And though I believe that kids learn at different rates, I’ve always wondered if maybe she just needed a different teacher to get through to her. . .



Hence, one of the reason we DO have another teacher, through our new virtual school.


But, one thing just happened that has given me a huge confidence boost and made me feel even better about our past four years as a homeschooling family: I found out my girls are On Target.


Just last week, they both were required to complete Scantron assessment tests in Reading and Math. After they finished, I sat back and waited to hear the worst: Your Children Have Learned Nothing At Home.


The results came through yesterday and with my husband looking over my shoulder, I nervously read the letter explaining the three segments each childs’ score can fall into: At Risk, On Target, and Advanced.


They were On Target, both girls, in Math and Reading in their respective grades!


I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve gone back to look at these scores, making sure my eyes didn’t trick me, making sure I was comparing their scores against the right chart. Even in the individual “skills” breakouts, there were no glaring issues to indicate that they are majorly deficient in any area.


So, no extra “classes” or worksheets or worries.

OK, I’ll still worry.

But, I feel a heck of a lot better now knowing that I got them this far, and feel relatively confident that I can get them through the next few years with one little step forward at a time.

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Filed Under: Fairly Odd Kids, Fairly Odd Me, Homeschooling, MAVA 3 Comments

Our first days in Massachusetts’ new virtual public school

December 16, 2010


Christmas in December!


Look what arrived on Monday:
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Inside these boxes is our new curriculum. We are officially now part of MAVA, the new virtual public school in Massachusetts.

(well, at least the girls are. My son, D, is still a free-flowing, hippy homeschooling kindergartner)

We’ve plunged right in which is why you haven’t seen anything new on this blog all week. Holy crow, there is a lot to figure out, though I’ve had enough people say TAKE IT SLOW that I get it.

Take it slow.

But, ZOMG, look at all of this? I’m part giddy with excitement and faint from fear.
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But thank goodness for my friend Miriam who is a few months ahead in this journey and has answered my desperate, need-an-answer-right-now questions like, CAN WE WRITE IN THESE BOOKS?!?!?!?!?! (her voice-of-reason answer? yes, most of the materials are consumable and here is where you could’ve found out the answer for yourself before you wrung your hands for an hour).

The best was last night when I told her about my hatred of Study Island, a standardized test-prep program, where new math concepts were being thrown at my girls in multiple-question format and threatening to sink our floundering ship. She looked concerned and asked, did they watch the lesson first?

Lesson? There is a lesson? Somehow, without a smirk or an eyeroll, she dragged me over to our friend’s computer and pulled up the program to show me where “Lesson” clearly was stated next to the test area.

So, that has been my week in a nutshell: Moments of Oh My God I Can’t Find Anything How Can They Expect Me To Do This I Don’t Have All The Materials followed by oh. it’s right there.

We’ve also “met” our teacher on the phone and in virtual classrooms, and we all like her. She is thankfully also the same teacher that my friends have, so the kids can “wave” to each other when they are in the same class.

I’ll try to chronicle some of our new homeschooling journey here even though some people may not exactly call this homeschooling. But, to me, this doesn’t feel all that different from what we’ve been doing for the past four years except we have more of a schedule now and some online classes to attend (though almost everything is flexible). I’ll let you know if at some point I really feel like we have entered Public School Land.

Maybe it’s when we get the School Lunch requirements. Heh.
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Filed Under: Fairly Odd Kids, Fairly Odd Me, Homeschooling, MAVA 11 Comments
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