December, 2008
The 2008-2009 school year has brought our family a grand experiment – homeschooling. Due to a higher demand on the elementary school system in our corner of Colorado’s Douglas County, our son’s school switched to a “track” schedule. With two other children on a normal schedule and a fourth grader potentially on a different schedule, we’ve found ourselves on a collision course with chaos.
Looking for alternative solutions we’ve realized we may not need a brick and mortar school, after all. Our first choice was to use one of a few on-line Colorado schools. Douglas County School District (DCSD) had just introduced a brand new on-line school (eDCSD.org) and we eagerly signed up. Unfortunately, for variety of reasons, this was not a good match for either our son or me, and after a few weeks of struggles I was questioning my sanity. With some wise counsel of friends with homeschooling experience we’ve immersed ourselves into this wonderful new universe.
Homeschooling is in a sense a small step in regaining something of what we’ve lost since ceding most aspects of our lives to professionals. After a few months, and as we approach the new year (2009), perhaps it is time to begin sharing some of our frustrations, successes and maybe even some interspersed bits of wisdom. Exsedda.org will be our communication vehicle. Hopefully, this will also be a learning process for us since we’d learned that everything we do can be used for learning.
Martin F. Bassani
Parker, Colorado
Hello!
I just wanted tell you that your blog has been very useful to me. I came to it via the quizzes for Getting Started with Latin. I have been HSing for about 4 years & some of the resources you have listed are totally new to me (the Bridge Construction Set, for example).
Thank you for blogging your journey!
Vanessa
Thank you for your kind words. Comments like yours make it all worthwhile. Bridge Construction Set has been been used by our older daughters who are now in high school. Our son keeps on coming back to it in between other interests. He’s been getting better in chess by using Fritz and Chesster 3 and beating me with increasing frequency. Chess seems to me be his main focus at the moment.
Thanks for the tip! Our 10 year old LOVES chess … but is having trouble finding people to play with and he’s been beating us for awhile now. Our local club is closing down until further notice – crossing our fingers that we find meet some like minded kids at the next tournament.
V.
I am working on an on-line chess school for beginners targeting homeschoolers. I haven’t yet found the necessary time to fully develop the necessary teaching material. As a part of this there would be a secure on-line place where homeschooled kids could find chess partners. I already have a domain name chessaces.org . The teaching infrastructure is based on open source Moodle and is already there. The same goes for the on-line club. I just need to develop the on-line materials.
Fantastic! We’ll be watching for that.
V.