Whirlwind!

As if to prove that:

1) It is indeed spring, and
2) I am indeed on break

We've done too many things to blog about in the last several days. Had ~l~'s family over (adventures), had BIL over for dinner, had a bonfire, had GirlieG sleep over (more adventures), put down more patio bricks, had another nine-kid meetup over at MD's place, went to the History Museum (Free every Thursday 5-8pm!). Somewhere in there the kids played outside enough to need several baths a day and go through too much clothing. Busy, busy, busy.

Somewhere in all this I made a decision I've been sitting on for quite a while and pulled Girliness out of K12/WAVA. The letter I wrote to her teacher really sums it up pretty nicely, so I'm not going to rewrite it...here it is:

I thought I'd give you a heads-up that you will not be receiving work samples from us. We are withdrawing from WAVA. We have found it a poor fit for Becca's learning style. We've found that she goes on a fit of learning in a single subject and that the WAVA curriculum slows that learning down - and that when she is unprepared to learn a particular thing she simply does not, creating a battle. She is currently reading Level 2 books, but according to the WAVA benchmarks isn't reading at all. This is not as simple a problem as it sounds...we chose to forego traditional schooling to avoid this type of busy work, only to find ourselves in a situation in which I would be testing her for the next year and a half on things that I know that she knows. Meanwhile, she is finding and naming insects, using a field guide to identify plants, and learning about monocots and dicots...and going nowhere in the WAVA science curriculum.

In short, K12 is at odds with the way she would learn in a natural non-forced way. Since the natural way that she learns is both faster and easier than forcing a curriculum on her, we've elected to stop the struggle and lay aside the artificial structure.

You have been an excellent teacher and we appreciate that. There is nothing artificial in the above statements about why we are leaving. The administration and you, our teacher, have been wonderful and non-adversarial despite our failure to "fit in" from the beginning.

So now we are afloat in a complete lack of curriculum. Not that I care. We were paring down the K12 curriculum a ton and STILL felt like we were just going through the motions, the real learning happening elsewhere. I do believe that now that Becca has officially shaken off the public school mentality (as of a month or so ago), we're ready to dive into unschooling headfirst. I already know that we'll come out on top, because Becca has rapidly picked up better and better reading and writing skills without any coaching at all from me (aside from the occassional "I can't read this word mama, o-u-t-s-i-d-e" "what does o-u-t spell?" "out...OH, outside!"). So...woohooooo off we go.