There have been a lot of changes in my life in the last year.
One of which I told myself I would never do was put my youngest in regular school. I had all the intentions of homeschooling him through his entire schooling. However, life throws wrenches in things all the time. I made the decision to send him to our local public school this year.
He needs a speech evaluation, and his doctor up to this point has refused to give us a referral for one. The school said they would evaluate his speech, though as of yet, it has not been done.
My work became more demanding of my time making it difficult to give him the time and attention that he needed. I work from home and this can be challenging at times with him here with me. However, the fact that my job does not have standard hours makes things frustrating. I have been looking at different job options. Unfortunately, it would require me to be on site. This would mean I would still need him in school or have someone watch him.
I also decided that I needed to reduce my stress level with the issues I had been having. Taking one thing off my list of daily responsibilities seemed like a good choice. It was a very, very hard choice though. It makes me feel horrible that I had to make this decision. I went back and forth on it so many times. Ultimately, I decided to put him in regular school. I also knew there would be challenges in that as well.
I really miss having him around all day and being the one teaching him.
Do I regret it? Yes, very much so. Am I going to pull him out and go back to homeschooling? At this point, probably not until the end of the school year.
He seems to enjoy being around the other kids. He is farther ahead in some areas, and right around where he should be in others. He misses our trails and time together. He gets frustrated that there is almost no time to just play during the week. He has been picked on as well as physically hurt. He has started picking up habits and saying things that I wish he was never exposed to at this age.
I was worried that educationally he would not be at the same level as the other kids. He just turned 6 before school started. I requested he go into 1st grade because he was way past kindergarten level work. I was mistaken. He is so far ahead of the other kids in his first grade class. He is reading early chapter books. His teacher is sending home 4 books each week that he is supposed to read each week. These books take him maybe 5 minutes to read all of them. He stumbles over none of the words. So, on his reading log I list the books he reads to me besides these each day. He is supposed to read 20 minutes a day out loud. I don't think they believe me. He keeps bringing home these early reader books. It's very frustrating.
He is way beyond the math as well. We were working on memorizing addition and subtraction facts. Working on mental math and how to calculate in our head. We were learning place value, creating graphs and chart, double digit addition and subtraction, counting money, telling time. They are working on adding to 10 with drawing it out on their papers. He is very bored.
The art class they have twice a week they are expected to be completely silent and still. They are tracing lines still. TRACING LINES. Seriously. We had started working through a drawing book. We worked with acrylic and watercolor paint. We started drawing with charcoal and pastels. Cutting and gluing his creations from construction paper. Now, he is doing things he did several years ago.
His writing has degraded from where he was when school started as well. We had been working on creating sentences based on either what we were reading or a prompt. They are finishing sentences by adding a few words to it.
They are phonetically spelling words out. I get that. I can see with what he has brought home that, even though he passes every hearing test he does not hear things correctly. It may be part of his speech problems, it may not. Time will hopefully show us which so that I can help him.
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