A whole new direction

This has been a long time coming I think but it's finally gotten through my thick-skull that we need a new direction with our schooling efforts. Matthew and CAVA (K12) are just not a good fit. It's a lot of sitting in front of a computer reading stuff and doing worksheets, basically similar to the type of work you'd find in a classroom, just with richer material. This is just not Matthew's style. He doesn't enjoy reading and it can take hours to get him to read something not of his choosing. He loves having me read to him and if he's interested in something, he's fine doing the reading. It's not that he can't read (he tests several years above grade level), it's that he just doesn't enjoy it the way Christopher does.

So we are biting the bullet and making the switch for all our sanity. We are disenrolling Matthew from CAVA effective Friday and I'll be starting the enrollment process for both he and Jonathan with Ocean Grove. I plan to leave Jonathan in CAVA until he's officially enrolled with Ocean Grove since he's still fine with the curriculum and we need to keep his services going but I'm really excited about the new direction.

One thing that has always been hard with Matthew not being very independent if he's bored is that both boys are learning totally different things in 6 different subjects. It's just impossible to try and actually "teach" both of them, sitting in on every lesson and being totally there without it taking all day which means nothing gets done around the house and Nico spends yet another day in front of the tv or computer. So our new goal is to do more a classical education/unit study approach with lots of reading classics aloud and discussing them and then finding stuff the boys are interested in and finding unit studies for them and going totally in-depth with it. Lots of hands-on stuff and trying to find ways to include Nico in some of it and keep those darn monitors OFF! I'm even hoping to have some studies where Christopher can participate as well next year to make life even easier.

So here's to the start of a whole new adventure. I'm really excited by it and praying that this solves many of the school stresses we are currently struggling with.