After years of swearing I would never do such a thing for a variety of reasons, we decided that it would be best for my fifth grade daughter to be homeschooled this year. This has nothing to do with her school, which we love, or her teachers, who we also love, but because of various neurological issues she’s experiencing that make it difficult for her to cope with the pace of fifth grade at the middle school. We’re giving her a year for her brain to catch up with her physical age, basically, and then trying it again next year.
And since I am home, and have a teaching credential, I’m the teacher. I think we’re all feeling a bit trepidacious about this, since she and I have a lot of similar issues, and sometimes, well … we’d all like this to avoid being the Chad and Sarah Grayson Memorial Home School Center. Day one … not bad.
Learned right off the bat that I’d have to teach in 5 minute nuggets, and then she does best with smaller bursts of guided practice. But she cooperates with me, and really still likes the actual content of the work. We may have done this just in time.
Since we’re doing this through her school’s home school program, we’re keeping along with the classroom curriculum, which is all about the solar system right now, specifically, the outer solar system, which means Pluto and that whole controversy, because that’s actually in the textbooks now.
Sarah is not happy about the new status of Pluto. It took a minute to convince her that nothing had actually happened to Pluto, that it had not been, Alderaan-like, blasted by the Imperial Death star into more chaff to join the kuyper belt. And we talked about how planets are classified and who gets to make the decision, and why … and we talked abourt Ceres and Eris, and Charon, and decided that, hey, let’s just let them all in. I can undestand how my scientists friends might be freaking out about that, especially in the case of Charon, but hey … can’t we all just get along?
I don’t know if we’ll be attending any “Save the dwarf planets!” ralleys, but we’ll have to see. Found that Youtube and other sites have great resources for supplemental videos. Watched “The Universe: The Outer PLanets” I think it was legal since it was marked as an official play list and listed “for educational purposes only.”
It just figures that this would be where we’d start, doesn’t it?
The Random Avenger 