Halfway Through Our Virtual School Year with Calvert (Leavenworth Virtual School in Kansas)

originally posted 2013ish

A homeschooling friend was asking my son some questions about our virtual school yesterday so I wanted to FINALLY take a moment to put this together to let you know how our virtual schooling has been going since I know a lot of people have questions about it.

Kindergartner Eva does some of her computer lessons, like typing, learning how to send email, how to do Excel spreadsheets, use Paint, etc.

We are eclectic homeschoolers usually ... ranging from an expensive Catholic curriculum one year to Sam's Club workbooks another to whatever is donated to us to IXL Math and CTC Math and general hippie or unschooling methods. We love free online resources like Khan Academy for Math and, believe it or not, Orkin for Science!

Virtual school has been a change but something I needed personally to keep on track. The testing does freak me out but I need that pressure ... you might picture homeschooling parents as all organized and teaching at the dining room table from 8-3 every day but that's actually pretty rare. We are all super different and I'm finally getting some footing here in my 8th year of homeschooling!

So here are the basics:
For $45 per kid we get EVERYTHING we need to homeschool. See my posts on unboxing curriculum for Kindergarten, 3rd grade, 5th grade and 7th grade.

There are 2 crazy days when you have to hit every subject and do one checkpoint for each subject. The district/state requires this and you just block it out on your calendar and don't plan to do anything else those 2 days.

We have to do 160 lessons total before the end of May. Each lesson might have only 5 checkpoints in 5 different subjects or it may have as many as 8 or 9 in a busy day.

You can go at your kid's pace. My boys are going to get their spelling lessons for the ENTIRE YEAR done by January 9 because spelling is easy and fast for them so why not knock it out and not have to worry about it anymore? Callie will do Picture Study for the whole year this week. Then we focus on harder subjects at a slower pace.

We like to do one or two subjects per day instead of one LESSON per day because it's a pain to switch from one subject's books to another. It's easier to just do several checkpoints for one subject ... keep reading on Science for a few chapters then it's easy to knock out several Science checkpoints.

We need to log 160 days of attendance for our virtual school to keep their accreditation ... (see tips below on logging attendance). It does NOT log TIME SPENT online per kid like K12 and other programs that REQUIRE your kid to BE ONLINE for 6 hours a day. There is no way we could do that. Also, if you have a kid who likes to work at night, they sure can.

I am behind on math for every kid and our awesome facilitator Gary is coming end of this month to do testing so I am feeling a bit stressed about that. I believe he only comes one more time for testing at our house but we also have STATE TESTING to worry about in April, I believe. I have to point out that I freak out about testing in general and it's not because the school is putting is putting any pressure on me or anything!

Tricks, Tips and Other Stuff:

If we have a sick day or day we were out and don't show attendance, I might have the kids each do one CHECKPOINT (not one entire lesson) on a Saturday or Sunday to show one day of attendance. Then we can work harder and catch up later but I like to see that we are on track attendance-wise so I don't have to worry at the end of the year.

We have only been on one field trip but it was entirely free for my virtual schooled students, leaving only myself and my 5-year-old son to pay for our portion. In December we went to see a play at The Coterie then ice skating at the Ice Terrace at Crown Center. What would have been a $72 field trip ended up only being $24 ... we had to get up earlier than our norm but it was worth it!

If your kid is "behind" for their grade, they don't ridicule you. There is a program called Verticy, which I have one of my budding readers in. If you don't like the math program, they will get you a different one. If you need lessons read to your kid they can get you a program to do that.

ANY OTHER QUESTIONS? Please ask! I'm happy to answer them in the comments or in another post!

My #VirtualSchool #Homeschool #Confession #FallSlacking

I have a confession to make. I see a lot of homeschooling moms in Facebook homeschool groups planting a landmine like this for no good reason other than to make themselves feel awesome. It goes something like this (and it's a parody, so keep that in mind):

"There are 160 lessons in our virtual school and we are on lesson 80 and it's October first. Where are y'all at so far? How are y'all doing?"

And a lot of people ignore that post. Most people ignore that post, judging from the number of members in the groups. Not me. I dive right in with my confession. And you know what happens then? The others like me come out of their little homeschool closets and they SHARE and we get to know each other in a real way and it rocks.

I'm not trying to trash the over-achiever moms in the homeschool world. I am trying to let the ones who selectively slack know that they are not alone and they are not doing it wrong.

So like to the person above I replied something along the lines of:

"We are supposed to be on lesson 42, which is me going at a comfortable pace for us, but most of my five kids are behind and we definitely don't do every single activity in every single lesson or I would be homeschooling literally 30 hours per day, which is not possible. Also, it's the season of fall, which is gorgeous in the Midwest, so we do a lot of short homeschool days. We do a lot of one-checkpoint days where we just need to phone in our day of attendance. But then in the winter and on other down days we might do like 20 checkpoints easily each kit (a normal pace is like 7 in a day)."

So my confession is that we do a lot of short homeschool days so we can LIVE LIFE and ENJOY IT. I did not get into this homeschooling gig so I could sit at a table with my 5 kids from 8 a.m. until 8 p.m. pounding stuff into their brains.

And it doesn't have to be that way if that's not the kind of homeschooler you are!

So just be you! Don't feel like you have to be like the homeschooler down the street or like your sister-in-law or like the mom you heard about who had 7 kids and they all went to Harvard. Who cares? Not me. I want to be me and I want my kids to be themselves and I want us to enjoy the learning lifestyle we  have created and have been blessed enough to be able to live out!

Unboxing Our #Calvert Curriculum Goodies! Michael, Fifth Grade #Homeschool

I wanted to share our unboxing posts and pictures and am FINALLY getting around to posting my third and fifth graders!

Michael, Fifth Grade

Unboxing Our #Calvert Curriculum Goodies! Callie, Third Grade #Homeschool

I wanted to share our unboxing posts and pictures and am FINALLY doing Callie's!!!!!

Callie, Third Grade

Our homeschool bookshelf now. Just waiting on Michael's shelf to fill up!

More Answers About #Calvert #VirtualSchool through Leavenworth Virtual School in Kansas

Alena asked this recently in response to my post on how we are halfway through our Calvert/Leavenworth Virtual School year here in Kansas. I thought it deserved its own post:

Do you feel like you are teaching to a test?

No, I don't feel like I'm teaching to a test at all because we don't do any testing except for when our facilitator comes 3 times a year to our house to test the kids. It's all basic math and English. The state testing coming up is freaking me out, however. But I don't know that I'll have any ideas of what the test will be like first so ... I'll have to keep you posted! If you use regular Calvert you might have testing packets. We don't have to do those. Just read and do the checkpoints to see if they understood on most things. Some videos, some games, some tech stuff.

When the facilitator, who is incredible with the kids, comes to the house, he is maybe here for an hour. He is super patient with my girl who is "behind" in her reading abilities.

I believe I need to go to Leavenworth for testing but we are currently trying to figure that out since it's 45 minutes away.

I hope to report back more on the testing experience because a lot of people wonder about it. Then you can make a good decision over the summer about joining by fall!

Will you continue using it?

Yes, I would continue using it for all of my kids. So much so that we are looking into movie and want to stay in Kansas for this program. I'll have 5 in the program this fall. It really helps keep me in track. As rigorous as this program can sometimes be, I freeze up when I think about building my own curriculum. The researching, the purchasing, the hunting down, figuring out. This is all done for me and I love it.

How much time do you spend with each child?

Time depends on grade. Kindergarten I don't do all the suggested goodies to make it a full day b/c I don't think it's necessary and I don't have time with teaching 3 others plus she soaks up stuff from them. Kindergarten 30 mins but they have enough meat to make it a full day. 7th grade a few hours but you could turn it into all day as well if you really wanted to do every single thing in the curriculum.

I'm new to homeschooling and was wondering how you teach the younger kids different subjects at the same time? My kids are still pretty young (kindergarten and first grade) and don't work well independently yet.

Honestly, most of the time my 5-year-old and 7-year-old are playing. We try to knock out our school for all kids by lunchtime-ish. Winter days stuck inside all day we'll draw it out longer and make up for those gorgeous days we quit early to go to the park or do something with friends or take a field trip. 

Kindergarten should not take more than about a half an hour of real learning and the rest is learning through play. I know it works because both of my oldest boys learned to read by or at age 7 doing this and it worked for our family.

Mostly my kids don't work independently because I like to learn alongside them. My 7th grader likes for me to read him his Literature book and then he does the checkpoints (about 5 questions per day per subject). I let them loose on computer lessons like learning how to type and things like that. But I find that they usually need something. Oh, and Spelling is easy for my big boys so I let them go crazy on that alone ... they work WAY ahead on that and were done by January. Math we are behind on and will work more intensively on it. This won't work for some families but my kids like it.

Is there time left at the end of a school day for your kids to learn about things they want to learn about?

Absolutely. Some days do feel rushed, only because we have other things going on. One son is in Scouts. They all do Religious Ed on Tuesdays. We sometimes do Meals on Wheels. Wednesday afternoons are reserved for a playdate at a gym with other homeschoolers. Thursdays they have gymnastics for an hour. Fridays their dad is off work every other so that's more of a fun day than a homeschool day! Oh, and we like to go swimming at the community center and visit grandparents! Our days are full of memory-making goodness and we fit school around life!

Unboxing Our #Calvert Curriculum Goodies! Eva, Kindergarten and Samuel, PreK #Homeschooling

I wanted to share our unboxing posts and pictures!

The other day we got another large box from Calvert. Each kid’s curriculum is coming at a different time and I am glad about that so I can focus on each kid and take pictures and we can put the goodies away. I have to say it again: this cost us $45 for a box worth about $700-1,000 if we bought it alone. And we get a facilitator. The downside is we are on a school district’s timeline but I’ll take that trade-off to save hours upon hours of time in lesson planning.

There are So Many Books and resources and then even more online fun stuff like streaming Discovery Channel and BrainPop and other things.

We are all set for everything my kindergartner Eva needs for this year. Lots of fun books and activities and we are looking forward to getting started. We’re easing into it! Eva is super excited because we have never done “formal” school and she is wanting to read.

Eva, Kindergarten

Samuel, Pre-K
Samuel was not going to be left out so I went to WalMart and got him a Pre-K workbook and some supplies to try to match what Eva got!

Unboxing Our #Calvert Curriculum Goodies! Joel, Seventh Grade #Homeschool

I wanted to share our unboxing posts and pictures! Check labels for Fifth Grade, Third Grade and Kindergarten (also, preschool) for the rest of the kids!

We got back from our vacation with +Mr.Kerrie’s family on Labor Day evening. When we got home there was a large box in the kitchen that my stepdad had brought in for us over the weekend. It was my oldest kid’s curriculum for the year. I have to say it again: this cost us $45 for a box worth about $700-1,000 if we bought it alone. And we get a facilitator. The downside is we are on a school district’s timeline but I’ll take that trade-off to save hours upon hours of time in lesson planning.

There are So Many Books and resources and then even more online fun stuff like streaming Discovery Channel and BrainPop and other things.

We are all set for Math, Composition, Grammar, Spelling, Writing, History, Science, Art History, Reading, Geography and Computer Skills. Lots of fun books and activities and we are looking forward to getting started. We’re easing into it! My son is not thrilled because I let things go a bit over the years but he is super bright and I’m not worried that he is going to be a rock star at this (all the kids will rock this!).

Joel, Seventh Grade

Venturing into Virtual School

So I am in the process of filling out all the paperwork for 4 of my 5 kids to get a virtual school education. This just means I'm still doing everything at home, but lesson plans are done for me and all the materials I will need all year for each kid are boxed up and mailed to me for only $45 per year per kid.

Why? Because all 4 kids I will be homeschooling this year are entirely different and I want to be able to focus on them and  not on lesson planning and gathering materials and checking out benchmarks. I want to be teaching and helping and watching them learn. And getting a little help from a teacher who is checking and holding me accountable is going to be nice. As a free spirit, I have fought doing something like this but now I find I am looking forward to it. The kids are a little freaked but we will figure it out! It seems very flexible or I wouldn't be doing it. We can do school in the morning and then finish in the evening. We can rock it in 4 days or stretch it out over 7. It's our show!

Check out my post almost a year ago from when I said virtual school would not be for us! Ah, how times have changed!

Here is the link to Calvert's site, which I hear is one of the very best curriculums ... like the gold standard for homeschoolers if you can afford it. Well, $45 a year is affordable to me now, friends. Calvert runs Maize and Leavenworth virtual schools and I heard from a lot of friends who did Maize but only one who did Leavenworth. Sometimes I follow the crowd and sometimes I try my own way. We are going with Leavenworth Virtual School and I can't wait to write about it help other parents along in their journey. When I Googled "virtual school personal experiences" or "virtual school blogs" it was only a bunch of results for mostly Florida virtual schools that came up. I want to show people what virtual schooling is like ...

If I have any time to blog!

Here is a link that turned me off K12 entirely, written by a former teacher there. They are a huge business these days, it would seem and I want no part of that. It surprises me how many people just blindly sign up on line for their kids' education. I poked around all over the internet, read hundreds of comments and PMs on Facebook from friends who have done virtual school, spoke with some of the principals and more. This is a big decision to me to be asking for help and not doing my own thing since starting homeschooling in 2006.

I'll keep you posted and please ask me any questions in the comments section and I'll pop by to answer!

Homeschoolers Teaching to the Test (Virtual School Ramblings)

I took my oldest son to the orthodontist to get his braces off recently (round one of braces, mind you). I ran into a woman who said she homeschooled, so I was excited to meet someone like me, a minority member ;-)

Let me tell you we are not all alike, though, so don't think for a second that you know all homeschoolers.

It was like I was in a movie as she went on and on about virtual school*** even though I expressed a few times that we were happy doing things the way we were, which was more laid back. She was like, “We homeschool 5-8 hours a day and we are all about the TEST TEST TEST. I am teaching for the test because they have to know how to TEST.” I'm not kidding you ... I think she was on a LOT of caffeine. Her daughter looked mortified, as my kids probably look when I'm touting laid-back homeschooling! 

I’m not homeschooling for Harvard, people. I mean, if they go, great! But I want them to love to sit around reading a book not because they have to write a book report on it or be tested on the contents of it. I don't remember 90% of what I learned in school. Make sure they know English and Math and send 'em out with their wings. Read history if they love history, do science experiments if they love it. That's how we homeschool.

I mean, some of them are not happy with the virtual school system's rigidity. Some love it AND then their kids also get to go to enrichment activities like book clubs and American Girl doll clubs and gymnastics. It's what works for you, but don't shove it down my throat, please!

I want them to sit and create art and engineering stuff out of Legos and whatever materials they can find. 

Eight hours of homeschool a day plus activities and sleep and other kids’ needs doesn’t leave a lot of time for exploring in a forest, picking up trash along a stream, volunteering at a food bank and so much more!

And this ends another episode of "We All Homeschool Differently" ... join us next week for another episode of this dramatic series!

Oh, and next time I run into someone like that, I'm going to start shoving Natural Family Planning down her throat. Because we all love having our reproductive goodies questioned, don't we?

***We did go on to try out virtual school for 2 years but it was nothing like what this woman's experience was. We had a review in December to see how we were doing then in May we had the final testing stuff. I didn't drill my kids all year to know every single answer. I just told them to do their best ... the results were better than I thought they would be from kids who are homeschooled by a mama who just likes to have a lot of fun with them and keep it non-boring. Our virtual school was not done 5-8 hours a day, by the way, but some are. Choose wisely and ask a lot of questions.