I've been putting this off for a bit. Curriculum has been chosen, plans are set, and things are moving along. Harry will be in 6th, Sam in 4th, and Annika in 2nd grade. Emma will be a preschooler again. (She has another year before she's eligible for school. I'm hoping she'll still be happy to be a preschooler for one more year.)
Among the regular plain-old changes that advancing a grade brings is another, bigger change. Annika went to our neighborhood school for kindergarten and loved it. And by 'loved' I mean cried-if-she-missed-a-day, begged-to-go-on-Saturday loved it. She had a blast and met a group of girls she is still friends with. To say that she wasn't super-thrilled about coming home from school is an understatement. I naively thought it would get better as the year went on and it has to an extent. She has both loved and done well at her charter school, where she goes to one day each week for fun classes. She has taken cooking, arts & crafts, Greek & Latin Roots and other fun things. She also begged to take a math class toward the end of the year and I'm pretty sure it was at least partly because it reminded her of school.
Annika is chaos embodied. She has to be doing something all hours of the day. She gets up much earlier than the rest of us and wreaks havoc early in the morning. As a consequence of that though, she generally goes to bed easily and I can breathe. I originally sent her to school to get a break from this chaos and to preserve a relationship that was, quite frankly, fraying at the edges. I didn't want that to happen at the age of five, so kindergarten came at a good time.
Partly because of the chaos and partly because of my own deficiencies, we never got into a groove this year. You know, where things go relatively smoothly and you realize that "hey, there's a lot of great learning happening here!" That's not to say that learning didn't happen, it was just more disjointed than I'm comfortable with. And next year with Harry in middle school...eek. I need the groove and organization and all of that.
So I've decided to try to put Annika back in school. The wrinkle here is that I'm not going to put her into the school she went to for kindergarten. I'm trying to put her into the school her best friend goes to. I know the principal there and some of the teachers. I think it's a decent school. Not as good as home, but that's life. If all hell breaks loose and things go poorly I know that I can pull her out, but for now the plan is for her to go to school there through elementary.
And because I made this decision and the universe is kind of cruel like that, we had an absolutely fabulous day of learning today. Nothing like that to set your mind spinning again. So, what curriculum is my second-grader going to use next year? Whatever the school has (and a bunch of stuff that I have, just don't tell Annika).
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