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The move west and the homeschooling experiment
Thursday January 18 2007 10:48 PM
A lot has changed since my last post... Jennifer has accepted a position with Genentech and as a result we've moved to the San Francisco area. We put our old house on the market in early-December and haven't received an offer yet. Hopefully things will pick up now that the holidays are over. Getting the house ready to sell and moving has kept us very busy for past few months.
We have a bunch of boxes in our temporary apartment in San Mateo that still aren't unpacked. I figure we'll finish unpacking just in time to repack and move to a more permanent location. We haven't decided on a permanent rental yet, but we weren't planning to look very hard until next month. The big news at the moment is that I've decided to use the time we are in temporary housing to experiment with homeschooling Julia. I've enrolled her in the California Virtual Academy @ San Mateo (a public charter school for homeschoolers) and we've been homeschooling for almost 2 weeks.
It seems to be going OK so far but I'm withholding final judgement until we've been doing it for at least a month or two. Several things are a bit abnormal about these first couple weeks. First there is the normal learning curve you'd expect with something new. Second, we've been working on finding Julia's level. She placed into 1st Grade second semester for Math, and 1st grade first semester for phonics/language arts. However, most of the first semester phonics/language arts lessons have been things she already knows, and I'm intentionally doing some of the 1st grade first semester math lessons because they require her to know how to spell 1-12 and she only knows how to write them in Chinese. :-) Third, we don't yet have the materials the school provides and we haven't been contacted by the teacher that we are suppose to meet with regularly -- that should change next week, but in the meantime I'm sort of winging it...
One of the major upsides to homeschooling is the flexible schedule and location. We've spent the past week in southern California with Jennifer's parents, and have been homeschooling here. Yesterday, we went to the Knott's Berry Farm theme park for the day and just did a little school in the car on the way there and back. Since all the other kids were in school there were no lines at all. Can't beat that!
We all miss our old friends, our old neighborhood, and our old house, but we've been so busy lately that we haven't had much of a chance to dwell on it.
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