Homeschooling 2021 - 2022 : Week 17/36

 It has been another solid week in our house in terms of homeschooling. We are making our way through the material we need to and are wrapping up this semester. I cannot believe we are through a full semester already. We will most likely be schooling until July sometime because we took off more time than I anticipated in October for a funeral that we attended out of state, but that is okay because that is one of the benefits of homeschooling. There is some flexibility in our schedule that allows for things to pop up and for us to still get our stuff done. Plus, we did not start our school year until the Tuesday after Labor Day, so we weren't going to finish our 36 weeks until the end of June had we not had those October setbacks.  

I was hoping to take a week off in-between semesters in order to scrub down the house from ceilings to baseboards and go through all of our items to make sure they are things we really still need/use/want. The girls are pushing to just start next semester right off without the break. We'll see what kind of compromise we can come up with. I always feel a deep urge to go through all of our stuff twice a year and to deep clean the house and every single one of its nooks and crannies as well. With spring here, and warmer temps just days away that urge to get my cleaning/sorting done is becoming pretty intense for me. We'll see what happens. Stay tuned...

When we lived in New Mexico, I reached out to their school for the blind, asking for help and/or access to information/resources that I could use to make Sarah's learning experience a good one. New Mexico, like North Carolina, has the same philosophy towards homeschoolers - they will not (in New Mexico's case they cannot financially) help support homeschoolers. BUT the school for the blind in Alamogordo was amazing, and a teacher came out from the school (which was about an hour away from us) gave us a old brailler, supplies, and a braille curriculum so that I could teach Sarah braille.  They did all of this without charging me a cent. They did it because they knew that braillers and curriculum were expensive and they wanted to help us in any way they could (such is the way of the people of New Mexico). I will forever be indebted to the New Mexico School for the Blind for their generosity because with their gifts I have been able to teach Sarah both uncontracted and almost all uncontracted braille. (She had a tutor from Indiana teach her the remaining uncontracted braille I did not get to.) I am not using this curriculum to teach Elizabeth braille as she has chosen this has her required language for high school.

Sarah and I are slowly working our way through this book. She is amazing at math when you look at all that she does mentally. We have some left-over resources from the amazing help Plainfield High School gave us in Indiana and use those for math, plus I have purchased more graph paper for Sarah, but other than that we just make up stuff as we need to make sure she is learning the stuff she needs to know. I think the hardest thing for me about living in North Carolina (besides its awful summer humidity) is the fact that we went from a school district that fully supported homeschoolers - who would give Sarah any resource she needed in order to be a successful student (things I could never afford to buy for her were gladly loaned to her for as long as she needed them) to one in which they will do jack shit for her. They will perform the federally mandated test that determines if Sarah qualifies for services (which she will) and that is it. Which means we are completely on our own competing for college spots with kids from high schools who not only can see, but who also have access to so many resources Sarah does not. Now the argument could be made that we choose to homeschool and therefore we have opted out of those resources - an argument that I would have completely agreed with you on for years, but now I don't. Because here's the thing - I pay for the taxes that go to support our schools just like every public school parent does. I should then have access to the resources I need to level the playing field for my child. But as we all know, life isn't fair, and so Sarah and I do the best that we can to learn the subject material with the resources we do have. And she does amazing. 

Sarah and I just finished up this book. It took us forever to get through. I have been reading what I call 'great books' with the kids for years. I started it with the boys when they were in high school and, over the course of the years, have read through dozens of books. This is probably one of my favorite legacies I am leaving my children in terms of their homeschooling experience. I hope that if any of them choose to homeschool their kiddos that they also will read the classics with their children too.