Happily Homeschooling in Florida

We are now a full two months into our homeschooling adventure, and it truly has been an adventure!  From learning about dinosaurs while standing in their tracks in Denver to navigating the common core and what it means to us, we are finally getting into our groove.

The great thing (for us) about homeschooling in Florida is that it’s soooo easy!  File a letter of intent to homeschool with your superintendent, keep a portfolio of your child’s work and provide an annual evaluation of progress to the superintendent and voila!  Done!  (The official Florida statute can be read here).

No rules to follow, no standards to meet, not guidelines or restrictions on how, when or what a homeschool student should learn.

I entered the world of homeschooling families with little preparation and support but wasn’t really worried about it.  I’ve been bumbling through it, using my background in education, to work through our days.  My homeschool environment is probably not as structured as some or as regimented as people might expect but it’s working for us.  We have a flexible schedule and I generally let the girls decide when they want to do what work, so long as they get it all done (more on our schedule in “In the Homeschool Zone”).

Aside from a few struggles with Honeybun not wanting to do work and claiming she “hates school at home,” it’s been working well for us and it has lived up to the expectations of all the reasons we chose to homeschool.

But I do sometimes doubt my ability to handle this huge task I’ve undertaken.  I sometimes worry that it’s not going to work and somehow we’ll come out on the other end worse.  And last week I had a bit of a freak out about whether or not we were going in the right direction and if I was giving my kids what they need.

I chose not to purchase a $300+ full curriculum for 1^st grade.  Because Honeybun was in an advanced kindergarten, I knew we would either end up skipping a lot of stuff she already knew or she would fight with me about being bored and not wanting to do the work so I didn’t feel it was a good investment at this time.  Instead, I started with a few full-year packs from teacherspayteachers.com (one for language arts and one for math).  Honeybun completed the full language arts pack while we were in Colorado and we’ve touched on most of the math topics.  We’re two months in, we must be missing something, right?!?!

So this weekend I tackled the portfolio portion of my homeschooling curriculum.  I had previously printed out the LAFS (Florida version of the Common Core Language Arts Standards) and put them in a three ring binder but had not put much of Honeybun’s work in it.  I took the time to read each standard and match her completed work them.  I now feel soooo much better about what we’ve done and where we need to go!  I can clearly see what we’ve accomplished and what we still need to cover and can plan accordingly moving forward.

I still need to do the same with math, but math I feel more comfortable with because we are still working on basic addition and subtraction and I would like to get her solid on that before moving on.  Science and social studies are not officially part of the Common Core curriculum so we’re just studying what we’re interested in at the moment.  We read about different topics of interest and do related projects.

Another two months and we’ll be looking at Christmas and who knows where we’ll be!