New School!

Taylor has officially started school with the Arizona Virtual Academy and I am loving it! At first I was a little apprehensive as the enrollment process was pretty tedious and his instructional materials did not arrive until the 2nd week of school. But now I am totally sold! His materials came in two big boxes and now that we are up and rolling with the lessons I can really see that 1) this is no joke; and 2) I get to watch him learn first hand- which is by far the coolest! But don't get me wrong- I would NEVER home school and once we get things figured out Taylor will be back in a public school. He seems to be having the most fun with his History lessons. We just finished up learning about Australia.

Cool Things About Australia According to Taylor:
1. Kookaburras
2. Coral Reef
3. Sydney

He made himself a passport and he makes a new "suitcase" for each continent we visit, in that suitcase he keeps all of his work about that continent and each night he has been really eager to show Daddy just what he has done. Math is just so/so. It is easy enough for him, but I can't seem to keep him focused on it. Language Arts has been iffy too, as he does not like reading "girly" stories. He also has Music, PE, Social Studies, and Phonics lessons as well as online lessons with his teacher and we'll start therapies via webcam for OT and Speech. The art projects have been fun, I am sure he is partly feeding off my own interests in what he is doing. But for the most part, this is going really well. Initially we were told it would be about 2 hours a day, but we are easily doing about 4-5 hours a day and still have some catch up work to do. Taylor was allowed to skip some lessons to get him to about the 1/2 way point in the school year, but other lessons I did not want him to skip so the extra work is coming from those areas.

Pulling him out of Santa Cruz was hard, and not a decision we took lightly. He seemed fine with it, but when we went to say goodbye to his teacher, he started crying and my mommy heart broke. I know I'll always feel some guilt over this decision and I hope it makes sense to him someday. I was trying to think of my first memories and I guess I have quite a few of Kindergarten. Of course my super genius Taylor can probably go further back and I hope he looks back thinking we had fun and that Mom and Dad always did what we felt was best for him.

Today we finished up learning about Australia by playing Great Barrier Reef Memory and then for fun we watched Finding Nemo. I remember when he was a little baby and would watch Nemo every morning from his saucer. Today he was so excited and called out each animal he now recognized. Somehow it's possible to fall even more in love with this little boy each day.