It's Over

Harry isn't going back to his school. I will call on Monday and tell them that he has started at a new school and won't be needing their services. I also need to talk to his teacher and get the work that he's done for her. He's way more excited than I am at this point. I had no intention of bringing him home until Spring Break at the earliest. I realized on Friday afternoon, though, that the school is toxic for him. And I don't say that lightly. I honestly believe that I would be shirking my parenting duties to send him back with what's happening.

So now what? I don't know. We will spend the time before Spring Break "deschooling," and getting used to being home. We will read a lot of books and spend some time catching up with each other. We will also have to work on getting rid of some of the behaviors he picked up at school. That won't be as fun as some of the other things!

I probably won't start him on anything really new for the rest of the year. We'll loosely follow the Ambleside Online reading list and work on some math facts. He told me today that he wants to learn how to do multiplication and division, so we'll work on that. I'm going to stay as far away from worksheets and meaningless things as I can. He's already done enough of that for the year.

In the fall I'll enroll him and Sam in one of the local homeschool charters and we'll start over again. But we're done with traditional school. It's just not worth it.