Dear December: I. Miss. You. With the new year came some new responsibilities for this wanna-be-super-mom. During our home education adventure we were enrolled in an online public school here in Kansas. We chose this avenue for many reasons, and a quality education and seamless re-entry into the public brick and mortar school (should the kids want to) were among the top two. As we re-evaluated our needs last summer we thought we may like to venture out on our own, but decided we wanted to learn more about what we needed to do make our experience successful.
Earlier this fall we made an informed decision and finally took the big leap! In the state of Kansas home educators are required to register their “private” school with the state and we chose a fantastically pretentious name: Compass Academy of Excellence. I. Love. it. In addition to academics a focus of our education is HUMOR. Have fun. Smile. Life is too serious, so why be twisted up when it simply isn’t necessary. Yes, we had some fun with our official name, but I assure you that there is some serious learning happening on East 9th street.
Our previous “virtual” school allowed for only core subjects and one elective per year, and while we had freedom to explore whatever we wanted much of our “free” learning time this winter and fall was already allocated to high stakes common core testing. Learning should be a balance of what we need to learn and what we want to learn. I believe that our new schedule is a perfect fit for us! We still have our core subjects of History, Pre-Algebra, Language Arts (reading, grammar, literature, vocabulary, and writing), and Life Science. Our electives were difficult to choose, but we finally decided on Computer Science: Coding, Spanish, keyboarding, Art, Health, and physical education.
The following is one of our latest challenges to welcome in the new year (and the end of Christmas break) the kids were asked to pick an interesting person from the early part of the twentieth century and make a 2-3 minute iMovie about them.
Average is Overrated 