SIDES and field trips

Today I went to the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory with with Stephen as part of another field trip in connection with SIDES.  The school seems to offer one to two field trips per month.  Each of the parents is responsible for getting their children to and from the field trip but SIDES covers the cost.   What we did at the Centre of the Universe would normally cost me alone over $10.

In the regular school system the idea of a field trip seems to completely died away.  Within SIDES it is still alive and well.   This is one more reason why I am happy with the choice we made to have Stephen go to SIDES.

I have no idea why the regular school system can not seem to be able to do field trips any longer.   Allocating $100 per student per year towards field trips and using public transit should allow for a lot of options.   At $100 per student per year, this would work out to less than 1.5% of the annual budget of the school district.   I remain skeptical at best at how school districts are managed financially, it seems like the staff have a tiny box they live within and are unwilling to consider that there may be any other way of doing things.

SIDES - Year two one month in

My son Stephen is now in his second year at SIDES and still very much keen to continue with the home schooling.   He is the 'poster' child for SIDES at the moment, the young blond haired boy on their front page is my son.

Stephen has been mixed in getting started with the school year, he has slacked and produced low quality work.   We have made it clear to him the expectations we have and that if he is going to be a problem he can go back to the regular school.

I should be better up to speed on his curriculum, but I have not spent enough time getting ahead of Stephen on the work. 

I have set Stephen a year long project to work on family history.   This should mean he makes use of research skills, interview skills, write down his results and be able to use a genealogical database.  

The biggest issue I have is what to have Stephen do for PE - he is no longer in gymnastics and has not expressed interest in another sport.  I have had him do an investigation and mapping walk of Cuthbert Holmes park and today he went geocaching with Thomas and Laurel - this was a 9.1 km walk.

Shortly a second son will be taking a course through SIDES.  Daniel is in grade 11 and needs to take Spanish 11 and the offering at Esquimalt does not fit with his schedule.  I have a line on a tutor online to help him, the tutor being in Chiapas.

Coming to the end of the school year - update in SIDES

Stephen has been in the SIDES program for close to five months now and he is thriving with it.  He likes what he is learning and how he is learning it.

Over the last few weeks I have been very busy and therefore guilty that I have not been on top of what Stephen should be doing, but we are getting there to get all the lessons and tests in to the school this week or early next week.

Stephen is half way through grade five now, though officially a grade four student.   I expect that in a year he will finished with grade six and starting on grade seven.

We require Stephen to read and he has transitioned from Asterix comics and D&D manuals to novels.   He is actively enjoying reading the novels and reading at an advanced age.

His chess skills are getting quite good, he can win against me from time to time, though we both still make stupid mistakes.

Stephen is enjoying cooking, though there have been moments of disaster.   Last week he tried doing chocolate chip cookies completely by himself and put in too much better.....

It has not all been perfect, there are times when he is frustrated that he regresses on how deals with things and becomes very passive aggressive.  I remind Stephen that if he makes the process hard for me to deal with, I will send him back to the regular school.  This has been effective in getting him to calm and act more maturely.

If Stephen was not reasonably self motivated, there is no way that this would work, but he is and he does get the tasks done that are asked of him.  I am willing to try this for the full year next year.

Stephen and SIDES, two months in

Spring break is over and we are back at school. Last Friday was the end of our first reporting period with SIDES. We are awaiting the results from his teacher of the first set of material submitted.

Stephen is still very happy with his decision to work through SIDES. He tells everyone that asks that he really likes how it is going.

Stephen is 10 and would be in grade 4, but he is about 1/3 of the way through the grade 5 curriculum. He is motoring his way through the material fast enough that I think he should be allowed to slow down.

I am not talking about him not being some manner of structured learning, but doing more creative things with more of his time because he is getting far enough ahead. Since he is working at his own pace, what takes place in the school over a week or two he does in a day or two.

With the speed he is going through the material, and the flexibility of how he can meet the requirements, we are getting more relaxed in what Stephen does during the day. We are allowing him to do more creative things for longer periods

Stephen has had a chance to do some interesting things.

• We did an experiment on heat transference so that he could understand why water heats and cools faster than air.
• We pulled open the truck hood and looked at how an engine works after having viewed some videos about how a 4 stroke engine functions.
• He is learning to play the ocarina - his idea
• He is recording stories on the computer with special effects
• He is learning how to podcast
• He is writing a SciFi story
• He is using his Warhammer as his art project and will be building scenery shortly

Not only is he doing all these interesting things, I am at hand when he is doing them. It is interesting to be so closely connected to what his learning and how he is learning it.

The most active teaching I do is with chess. He is rapidly learning how to play chess very well and loves chess problems. In the process of working with Stephen on chess, I am finally properly learning chess. It is in teaching him formal openings, tactics, strategies, end game and more that I am dramatically improving my own game.

In most things Stephen is self directed and comes to us for direction to get started or to explain some part of what he is working on.

I have been looking for some online resources and I have found some good ones, though I would like to find some more, if you know of any, please let me know. If it were not for the online resources for everything, it would be very hard for us to work with Stephen. I am not sure how people managed it in the past.

There are down sides:

• He is in the house and does need some supervision, this impacts our ability to work
• Stephen sometimes does the absolute minimum and asks "Am I done?" - I can not watch him all the time and have made it clear that if he bullshits us the whole process will not work.
• He can get frustrated and adopt a whiny defeated tone at times, when he sounds like that it pushes all my buttons.

So far, so good. I am happy with how it is going. More and more people are choosing different choices from the child's education, I wrote about this recently for 24 Hours in Vancouver.

SIDES - close to a month now

We had our first review meeting with Stephen's teacher last week. Having SIDES nearby is nice because we can see the teacher in person and build a face to face relationship. She let us know we have quite a lot latitude in how we approach the circumlum. She is willing accept alternatives to assignments.

Stephen has now finished Grade 4 math and started grade 5 math. He is doing grade 5 work in all the other subjects already except for science where he is finishing the second half of the grade 4 circumlum.

Stephen is currently writing a news cast for his Thursday morning creative writing class. He has chosen to make it the super hero news. Next week he gets his first podcasting lesson.

Wednesday Sheila and Stephen went to the Symphony performance at UVic for school kids. The concert is called Musical Mechanisms and introduces the kids to how an orchestra works:

This concert titled ‘Musical Mechanisms’ will give students and teachers the chance to look at the different sections of the orchestra and how, like the working components of a car they all work together to run smoothly. Students join conductor Giuseppe Pietraroia, the 'prospective buyer at the orchestra dealership' on an eventful 'test-drive'. The members of Music Corner perform as dealership staff, demonstrating roles of the different instrument families through pieces that feature each section.

He is also very interested in the Virtual Science Fair. He wants to enter the categories with the most prizes. From this he has decided to do a project on improving the efficiency of internal combustion engine, specifically how to use the heat generated by the engine to create usable energy. He is think some sort of heat exchanger to create steam to run small turbine.

Stephen is taking less time from us to get through his work, but having Stephen here and Max is not going to work for our working lives. Max will be going into care, we found a daycare two blocks away.

I am trying to find interesting and engaging online resources, any thoughts about this would be much appreciated.

The Second Week of SIDES

At the end of last week we got some comments from Yule Heibel about my last post where I talked about my fears about the program after the first few days. It helped reduce my stress.

Over the weekend Sheila took the time to go through all of the material so we could be aware of what the program was and where we were with it all. Doing this really reduced our stress as we could get an overview. It aslo meant that we had to redo the tentative schedule we had for Stephen.

We are trying to have Stephen work on a fairly consistent set schedule from 9 to 3 each day. We are doing this for a number of reasons. First, we want to emulate the school day which Stephen is used to, the change in schooling is a big one in any way you measure it. Second, we want him to think of the day hours as learning time and not as just hang around time. Stephen would be on the computer or video game 24/7 if he could. He is able to finish the work quicker than expected and should be able to do his school work in about 2/3s of the time, but we do not want that extra time to be free time at this time. Third, we need the schedule so that we know Stephen is getting through the material. Fourth, Stephen needs to learn time management skills and until he has that down we think he needs a clear schedule.

The work has generally gone well over the last two days. Stephen has not flipped out over anything. We did find out on Monday that Stephen has limits for long he can work on paper before he needs an end. Due to a change on Monday from what the normal day would be, he was working in workbooks from 9 am to noon with a half hour break. That was too long for him.

I have a much better idea of where Stephen is at with his education after only a short time of the SIDES program. I am an active and engaged parent but I now understand how little I really know about my childrens' education. I ask at the dinner table about school and make them give me a run through of their day in detail. I have not missed any parent teacher interviews and often communicated with the teachers outside of the formal meetings. It has still been a bit of a shock to see how little I really knew about where Stephen was at in school.

Stephen only lives with us half the time. This week he is at Catherine's which means he has to come over here each day for school. We would be happy with Stephen doing school at Catherine's but there is no one there during the day so he really has to come here. We were worried how this week would work out, if there were major problems this is the week that would likely show the problem. So far things have gone well.

There was a PAC meeting at SIDES yesterday morning which we would have gone but we did not know about it. Yule said it was helpful for her and her family to be involved with the PAC so that they knew what was going on. I would like to at the PAC meetings to meet other parents doing the same thing as I still feel way out of my depth.

I suspect my next post will about how much of an intrusion doing this is to our day to day lives. Both Sheila and I work from our own home which means we can have Stephen doing this, but will it intrude into our work lives more than we can afford?

Three days in on Home Schooling

Stephen, our nine year old son, started home schooling this week via SIDES. Home schooling is not the term they use, they refer to it as distributed learning.

Issues for me so far:

• There is so much material for me to get a handle on - basically all of the Grade 4 and most of the Grade 5 curriculum, how can I take all in quickly enough?
• How long should I expect Stephen to be working on school work?
• How much of my time will it take each day to work with him on his school work?
• I am not a teacher, can I really do this from my end?

Stephen took part in his two virtual classes today. He logs on and enters a common online room with the teacher and other students. Everyone can type but they can also use their mic to talk to the others. The technology is advanced enough to make this work easily without hiccups, we had no trouble getting it to work.

I am getting a much better handle on what Stephen has learned and what he has not learned. I was surprised at some things I though he should have known by now, but they are only taught in grade 4.

I worry that Stephen will be bored working online and in workbooks. I know I need to make sure that there is more for him to engage with.

Over the weekend we are going to spend a lot of time learning the curriculum so that on Monday morning we will have a better handle on it all.

Any advice on a good site for parents????