Hello friends! We have an announcement! If you have been following us for sometime, you would remember we were on the news last year touching base on my life as a homeschool mom. We spoke about how I love homeschooling our five year old, Lovèah and how much she enjoys learning. We also mentioned that if for some reason, Virtual Learning does not work out for our three older children, we would move forward with homeschooling them as well. Which leads to today’s post…
We decided to withdraw our daughters A’Niyah & Réinah from Public School. Let me break down our reasons behind this decision. Let me start with our 5th grader Réinah. Réinah is usually an honor roll/AB honor roll student, but these two semesters have been such a challenge for her. I (LaShona) would come downstairs to find her looking so sad & sometimes in tears. I knew she wasn’t enjoying her last year of Elementary School and I had to do something about it! I monitored her throughout the semesters. I reminded her that it is her job to complete the assignments and turn them in ON TIME. I told her this every single day until I was blue in the face, but I would still get email after email of her having missing assignments. Right as I got the emails, I screenshot them and texted them to Réinah. I had her finish the work the same day. Now there were times when she had chromebook issues, so I had to exchange it for a new one. I was just tired of seeing her not show any excitement towards learning. Jason & I didn’t want her to do the lessons to just get by. We wanted her to show up to class prepared & ready to learn and try her very best! But, we didn’t get that, so we made the switch.
Now, let me touch base in A’Niyah, our 6th grader. A’Niyah has always been a hard worker. She puts forth effort in her studies even if she doesn’t understand something. Her teachers loved her and said the same when we had virtual conferences. The thing that caused me to make the decision to homeschool was she was too overwhelmed with work. She was in a program that helped her transition from Elementary School to Middle School. It’s not for every kid though. We had to pull our son out of the program and place him into regular classes because he just couldn’t manage the workload. A’Niyah on the other hand showed us that she could handle it and did great! Then grades started really slipping in the special program, and she wasn’t too fond of sitting in front of the screen for hours either. A’Niyah came downstairs a lot complaining about the length of her classes & for some of them she just want interested in because it wasn’t fun. I’ve always told our children that learning should be a fun experience. I guess you can say it stuck with them. A’Niyah did however earn the A/B honor roll while at this new school, so that was wonderful! She also had an IEP and her case worker was amazing! He really does care for the students and wants to see them succeed. I’m thankful Niyah gets to continue working with him even though she is homeschooled now.
February 2nd was our first day of homeschool! It was a bit different because I actually teach art at Nehemiah Academy Homeschool Co-op every Tuesday, so our girls had to work independently until Lovèah & I returned. They followed their rhythm board & did great! Once I got home, we started our lessons and I also included Lovèah so she didn’t feel left out.
We are using the same homeschool curriculum that I use for Lovèah, which is Gather’ Round Homeschool. The only difference is, we are doing a unit study. I wanted to start with the first unit, so we
chose North American Birds! You would think it wouldn’t be a good time to do this study, but believe it or not, there are quite a bit of birds showing up in our backyard. When our girls came downstairs Tuesday morning, they were blown away by all the things I had laid out on the table relating to birds. Once we got into our lesson, they had a blast! They had so much joy working together. I just sat back and watched them while they worked in their notebooks and my heart was so full!
They do their core subjects using a program called Always IceCream. There are a variety of lessons they can do including Science, Social Studies, Foreign Language, Art, Music, ASL and so much more! Since homeschoolers mainly focus on LA & Math for their end of the year testing, I focus mostly on LA & Math, but I do include the other subjects as well. Oh, and they can even learn about manners, typing and other life skills! We are going to have an incredible school year!
I literally prayed over their education before making this huge decision because I never like moving without hearing from God first. The peace I felt while teaching my girls was His way of telling me everything will be ok.
Note: Our son Jeremiah will remain in Virtual Learning for the remainder of the year. Of course, that could be subject to change.
If you have any questions about the curriculums we use, don’t hesitate to ask below!
Until next time…
Xoxo LaShona-