Summer Learning

I've always homeschooled Dakota. For the most part he is where he needs to be "compared" to kids his age except for his math skills. He struggles with that and I struggle with how to teach it to him. I've been considering putting him in a summer program to jump start those math skills...I know he'll hate it but he'll thank me for it later. :-)

What about ya'll? Have any of you readers put your kids in any summer math programs before? What did you think?

Homeschool - The Search Begins....

Since I have chosen to homeschool our youngest child, Dakota, I have to decide every year about this time exactly "how" I am going to homeschool him for the year. This will be our 6th year together in this schooling journey and we have done it all from totally unschooling to an online private school. Last year we tried Blended School which is an awesome program that Okaloosa County has here in FL to help homeschool parents teach science to their kids. They have teachers set up in different cities on different days of the week throughout the entire school year and the day is set up like a typical school day in regular public school (although much more relaxed!) and the focus of the whole day is on science related topics. Dakota went to a church last year on Thursdays from 9-3:15. He changed classes throughout each day - had 4 different teachers - and different subjects but all the subjects for the day revolved around the particular science topic they just happened to be studying that day. He loved Blended School!

He'll be doing that again this year on Mondays. The first part of the year (at least until Christmas) we were still doing his online private Christian school. He got bored with that though. I think the work was too boring for him....too babyish or something. I pulled out the textbooks after Christmas and we just worked together on his reading, writing, spelling and math in regular textbooks.

I started looking this week at different options because I think he is wanting to become more involved again with a homeschool club to do field trips and outings like we have done in the past. We quit doing that the last year or so because we had so much going on between family and church activities - there was never time! Now though with all the kids moving away, I think Dakota is needing some friends around. I found two places that sound real promising yesterday...one of them is Freedom Academy of Learning and the other one is CAPERS - going to check these out more and I think sign up for them. There is a local homeschool convention this weekend I think I will attend....Greg will be going out of town to visit his son at FSU so I'll have the morning free to roam through the convention at my leisure! :-)

I always throw all Dakota's stuff in a file folder or in a bag at the end of each year. I don't have any kind of order to his school stuff at all! I found this organization system that looked pretty neat! It's called The Full-Year Notebook System and it has all kinds of extras included to help with finding FREE curriculum at the library!

Okay, well I guess I'd better get on with my searching....TTFN