Homeschooling...for newbies

[mrs.b]

We are excited and moving forward with this. It will be so much healthier for Little Man, physically, emotionally, and educationally. He still does not know; he can't keep a secret and we do not want the school to know until we have everything ready to go. After a few days solid of research, Alabama does require homeschoolers fall in one of two categories: 1) either "enroll" with an umbrella/cover school, or 2) get a valid AL teaching certificate. Since option two is out for the time being - will investigate when more time is available to see how feasible it is - we are going with option 1. There is a shocking number of these schools out there, and virtually all exist ONLY to facilitate home schooling to keep the State off parents' backs. We have it narrowed down to four and are reaching out to them today to pick the one join starting with fourth grade.

Also, we are joining HSLDA this weekend so we can ask a handful of questions we have so we can be as prepared as we can be. Found some local homeschool groups, so we're touching base with them to see if they have any recommendations, and to see if we can go ahead and introduce our shy little fella so he can make new friends (and in a few weeks, when we're closer to the end of the year, going to touch base with the parents of his current friends to arrange more outside-school time since he won't see them in school anymore).

The next hurdle is developing a curriculum. Think we'll use one or two packaged curriculums as a starting point, and we have an aunt who was a school teacher in Georgia and has gone into special needs advocacy, so we are going to tap her as a resource to mix and match to suit our little fella's learning style. He's so capable of excelling, but when he wastes so much time a day listening to methods that do not work for him then spends more hours at home re-learning, he's tired, misses play time, and just manages to keep up in class. I know he can at least keep up if not excel if he can focus all his learning time on a method that works for him without wasting time on methods that do not, and get more time to be a happy little kid without the stress and negativity of the public school.