Happy New Year to everyone.

I am reading Homeschooling The Teen Years and another book about getting homeschooled teens ready for college. I've been searching for options for William again and I'm freaking out again. Someone stop me! I know that I need to slow down and see how things go. He'll be 13 in a few weeks and there is still plenty of time to figure high school stuff out. I just hate it when I think I have a solution to a problem then find out the solution may eventually cause a bigger problem and may not even be a solution at all. Glad I discovered this before spending a bunch of money over the next 4-5 years.

Right now I just need to focus on getting back in the groove of this school year. We had a long Christmas break and we'll take one more week off before heading back to work. I'll be heading back to school as well. I'm taking 3 college classes beginning January 8 and dh will be heading back to his radiology classes the next day. He's also looking for a part-time job so his time will be spent at school, work, and studying.

I hope everyone had a good Christmas and is looking forward to a great new year.

Labels: new year

Merry Christmas everyone.

We are now having Christmas break and will start back with school probably the 2nd week of January.

We've had a wonderful holiday with my family. We gathered at my grandmother's house on Christmas Eve and had a great meal and time together. Today we gathered at my parents' home, exchanged gifts, and had a potluck lunch / supper. Afterwards we all played a few games of pool then my copy of the WB version of Scene It!. It was a really nice day. We just got home and I'm about to put some music on my new Ipod :)

I'm not sure if I'm going to continue this blog on a regular basis just yet. I'll be going back to school in January and time has to be spent studying, working, and getting ready for William's end of the year testing. The next 2 years are crucial as he's getting ready for high school, so I do want to blog a bit about that. I've blogged the beginnings of our journey and I want to continue to end as much as possible. However, right now I guess I'm just not motivated to write anything. I mean, I've been blogging for what, 3 - 4 years? I'm not sure I really have anything more to say right now.

School has been the same old, same old, day in and day out, but I'm going to be reading some new things about middle school and high school and I hope to get out of the rut and onto some new things over the next 2 years.

I thank all of you for sticking with me through this lull and I don't blame you if you stop reading the blog. After all, you all have lives too. If you feel like it, though, stop in and see what we're doing. And as always I'm always available for new homeschoolers to email at the link above. I do check email all the time and will be available.

I'll write again in a week or so.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year everyone :)

School stuff is moving along. We aren't where I would have liked to be this year, but we are where we are so I'm dealing. I know I haven't posted a lot recently so if anyone out there is still reading this, thank you. I'll try to do better and I'll try to write some moderately interesting things.

We have decided to go with a correspondence school for high school, so after this school year the next 2 will be focusing on William's math and writing skills so that he will be ready for the work involved with a correspondence course. This is mostly due to finances. By taking a correspondence course he will receive a high school diploma and will be able to take his core classes for college here in Georgia with the help of the Hope Scholarship. If he graduates as a home schooled student with a homeschool diploma, the way the rules stand right now, he has to take 30 credit hours of classes before he can recieve Hope scholarship funds.

We are looking at James Madison High School. If anyone has used this school I would appreciate feedback about it.

He is almost finished with his current Lifepacs. I have already ordered a new science Lifepac and will be ordering more curriculum in January.

I wanted to start William on a geography program in January, but the one I like I will no longer be able to afford. I may just purchase a basic workbook program from a bookstore instead or find another one. Any ideas for the curriculum would be helpful. I'm looking for something for 6th - 8th grade level with map information as well as some basic information on the culture. I'm looking for something that maybe focuses first on the continents then goes into individual countries within that continent as the book progresses. I don't really like notebooking type curriculums or unit studies with a lot of hands-on crafts or anything like that. It just needs to be something straightforward and simple to use.

My dh is in school twice a week and will be finishing his first term next week. His second term will begin at the same time I will be returning to school - January 8. It looks as though he will need to get at least a part-time job while working so we can continue to keep bills paid. My work hours will also have to increase, so I'll be working, homeschooling and going to classes as well. My first semester will be online courses, though. I shouldn't have to take on-campus courses until the fall.

And to close out, we had a family Christmas gathering at Stone Mountain near Atlanta, Georgia on December 10. It was nice getting away for a little while and being able to take a Sunday off work.

Here is a picture of William, my dh Scott, and me:

I read this article at Yahoo News and thought it applied a lot to homeschooling as well. With technology changing the way many people live their lives, it should make sense that work and school will follow. Here are a few excerpts I found interesting:

At most companies, going AWOL during daylight hours would be grounds for a pink slip. Not at Best Buy. The nation's leading electronics retailer has embarked on a radical--if risky--experiment to transform a culture once known for killer hours and herd-riding bosses. The endeavor, called ROWE, for "results-only work environment," seeks to demolish decades-old business dogma that equates physical presence with productivity. The goal at Best Buy is to judge performance on output instead of hours.

Shouldn't that be the same for our homeschools and our educational system? If you can do the work anywhere then why should kids have to sit in a classroom for 6 or more hours each day? They can accomplish the same amount of work in a lot less time without distraction.

Yet ROWE continues to spread through the company. If intrigued nonparticipants work for progressive superiors, they usually talk up the program and get their bosses to agree to trials. If they toil under clock-watchers, they form underground networks and quietly lobby for outside support until there is usually no choice but for their boss to switch. It was only this past summer that CEO Anderson got a full briefing, and total understanding, about what was happening. "We purposely waited until the tipping point before we took it to him," says Thompson. Until then he wasn't well-versed on the 13 ROWE commandments. No.1: People at all levels stop doing any activity that is a waste of their time, the customer's time, or the company's money. No.7: Nobody talks about how many hours they work. No.9: It's O.K. to take a nap on a Tuesday afternoon, grocery shop on Wednesday morning, or catch a movie on Thursday afternoon.

It's okay to do math in the car, reading before bed, and English in a doctor's waiting room. Why have everyone locked down so that they cannot enjoy their lives because of an obligation to show up at a building at a set time?

Achen says he would never go back. Orders processed by people who are not working in the office are up 13% to 18% over those who are. ROWE'ers are posting higher metrics for quality, too. Achen says he believes that's due to the new office paradox: Given the constant distractions, it sometimes feels impossible to get any work done at work.

Sound familiar :)

Hopefully more businesses will begin to conduct business for the welfare of employees and not just the bottom line. It will be interesting to see how this plays out in stores. No more retail store hours? It may be interesting. Maybe school systems will also take a look at how technology can be used as well and give public schooled children more freedom. They have begun by offering the virtual school, but when you have to log onto the computer at a set time, then the freedom of the virtual school isn't really that free.