Surviving Home Schooling

 Home-Schooling Template

Well, this conversion to home-schooling has been interesting – to say the least. Requirements for home schooling differ from state to state, so we have had to familiarize ourselves with the requirements for PA. Fortunately, one of the home school associations provides a straightforward template for doing so. We used their template, with only a few simplifications, and submitted it to the East Penn school district office. 

Their other requirements are fairly easy to meet:

(1)   students in certain grades have to have doctor/immunization records and dentist records – not a problem since our kids were in a charter school and had them on file from there;

(2)   we have to have someone (a teacher with PA certification) evaluate the boys’ progress at the end of the year – also not a problem since we partnering with an outside institution which provides the curriculum and the grading and we have several teachers among our church who have done this for other home-schooling families;

(3)   students in some grades have to participate in standardized testing (including grades 3 and 5 which will affect 3 of the 4 boys) – we’ll have to figure this one out later in the year.

Liberty University Online Academy (LUOA)

As mentioned, we are partnering with LUOA to have a structured curriculum instead of a “roll your own” one. We looked at a couple of different options and this one seemed to fit our needs the best. Unlike many home-schooling families who start with their oldest child when they are kindergarten/first grade level and then add other children as they reach school age, we would be starting with all four grandsons at one and did not have the luxury of slowly getting our feet wet. We also wanted to go with a program that would give us the opportunity of having Caleb tested for third-grade readiness since he was so advanced in his skills (essentially skipping 2^nd grade). We had tried to do this with the Christian school we had gone with this summer, but while they did enrollment testing, they did not have the skills to help us.

The boys will each have five subjects – Bible, Literacy/Language Arts, Math, Science, and History – although for first grade history and science are each a half-year so Asher only has four subjects each day.

[A partial screenshot of the third-grade course list]

 

There is a good variety of methods used in the courses. Some days the lesson is only reading through a series of screens (e.g. learning the new vocabulary words and definitions for the module). Some have a short quiz to be taken online (T/F and multiple-choice question are graded by the computer when submitted, short answer questions will be graded by the teacher in the day or so following submission). Some have attached PDFs that need to be printed out – either because you will need to review them over the coming days, or because there are places to insert drawings or paragraphs that you write. And some are instruction sheets for experiments that you need to do. For the latter two types, you need to submit a picture of the completed page, a picture of the completed experiment, or perhaps a short video (more on this later under the technology subheading). There are also some required reading books in the literacy course. Some of these are available through online links, but others you need to purchase – they provide a list in advance so for only $50 or so we got all that are needed for all four boys for the year.

You can see a little bit of this variety in the attached partial screenshot.

[Module example]

 

The teachers will often return comments with the graded work. You can also communicate with your teacher via email for any questions.

A fairly robust program. We’ve discovered a few errors in the materials during the time we’ve been using the program. And there is a bit of inconsistency in the amount of work required by the various modules so it’s hard to predict how much time we’ll be spending online each day. But it’s better than having to develop all this stuff ourselves.

Technology

LUOA gives you good writeup of what technology you will need. We started out by purchasing two more laptops to supplement the ones we already had. (Then needed to get a third when one of our older ones died). These need to be full-function machines, some of the things that they use in the courses will not run on Chromebooks. We also had to purchase a printer as Kim did not have one in her house.

We also got a subscription to Microsoft-365 as we needed to be able to type some things, view PowerPoint slides, etc.

Besides one of the older laptops dying, the other one is running really slowly and may also need to be replaced. In addition, the first printer we got, while it seemed to work initially could not connect properly to the wireless network in the house, so we returned it (for full credit) and got one from a different manufacturer – it works great.

But there has been a fair amount of learning curve – especially for Donna who is not very computer savvy. Navigating all the screens is sometimes complicated. We’ve restricted the use of printing to adults only to avoid inadvertent misuse. And taking pictures (and even videos) of completed work for submission (several times a day with four boys each taking several courses) can be a bit time consuming. We’re getting better and quicker as we get used to things – but I admit to sometimes getting frustrated when too much is happening at once or something is not working the way I think it should!

How We’re Doing

On many days Donna and I feel like we’ve been “thrown into the deep end of the pool” and are struggling to learn how to swim. Because much of the first grade material needs a reading level beyond the average first-grader, Donna has taken that grade and has a lot of one-on-one time with Asher. I spend most of my time with our two third-graders, Isaiah and Caleb (he having scored over 90% on the readiness test for third grade), but they are working separately and not always doing the same module at the same time. Ethan is mostly independent and downstairs in his room, so I only have to check in on him from to time.

But I am also the go-to person for any technology issues that Donna is having and have to assist her (and Asher), and I take most of the pictures of things to be submitted. Kim is working from home (ensconced in her bedroom), but helps out from time to time and also helps with some of the “experiments” (such as making and decorating cupcakes with various types of candy to represent the parts of a plant and animal cell). 

One complication is that we didn’t switch to this program until 10/19, having spent the first nearly two months at the Christian school. LUOA allows people to start on any Monday, so that’s not a problem from their perspective, but it means that if we simply followed their typical M-F schedule for 180 school days, it would take 36 weeks and we wouldn’t be done with the school year until the middle of July (and all results need to be reported to the local school district by the end of June).

So, I had to put together a schedule that did six days of school each M-F by adding one additional lesson each day. I’ll figure out what to do with short weeks like Thanksgiving by the end of this month. I have used the calendar in the kitchen to post the daily requirements as you can see in the below picture. (By the end of this week we’ll be 3 days ahead of schedule.)

[Weekly schedule]

 

Most days we pretty well wrapped up by lunch time – which is good since we’ve also enrolled all four boys in our church’s after school program where they can get some socialization and activity. That also means that I have to drive them into town M-Th for a 2:30-5:00 program in addition to spending all morning being their supervising teacher. I’m pretty burned out at the end of the week. And it didn’t help this past week when Donna got sick and I had to supervise Asher as well! But we love all our children and grandchildren and they will appreciate this as they get older.

I’ve been tracking their grades each week and you can see how they are all doing – pretty much all “A” students. They are all different – different personalities, different interests, different learning styles. But after three rough weeks of transition, we are still all getting along. There are many more months of schooling, and I’m sure some days will be better than others. But we are a family and this is what families do.

[Current grades]