[email protected]

Daron- What you did sounds pretty much what we do. Just yesterday we met with
our Educational Specialist.

P.E. consisted of my children playing almost daily on their scooters and from
time to time playing tag and hide-n-seek with the neighborhood kids.

Reading was mostly me reading books to them, this month it's been American
Girls Meet Samantha and Journey to the Center of the Earth.

Math is the kids helping us balance the checkbook, them calculating their
allowance and the interest they have earned in the bank, along with helping
me keep track of how much money we spend at the grocery store and playing
games like monopoly.

History has mostly stemed from our reading the American Girls, however my son
has had a facination with the Civil War since last year.

Science is usually our gardening. We planted a pumkin patch, zucchini plant,
tomato plants, garlic, and green onions alogn with our flowers. Science has
also been catching and observing bugs.

Political process we don't get much of, but every once in a while the kids
ask questions about the president, govoner, voting, etc. Most of our
political process comes from our visits to city hall. The kids love going
there, they get all kinds of flyers and pamphlets given to them.

Writing often is notes, cards, letters to friends. I just make a quick
photocopy. Now that we have a printer the kids love me printing out those
online worksheets. We keep a pile of these around, and whenever the kids want
they pick one up and usually end up just coloring them, but they pretty much
always write their names at the top and will sometimes do a few of the
problems. I really don't care if they do them or not, they think their fun
and it's a sample for the school.

The kids play TONS of computer games. They love the Jumpstart games, and
those have a "progress report" that you can print out. This is another
sample. The kids love playing their Wishbone game (The amazing odessy), and
lately we've been creating a play using the American Girls Premiere cdrom
which when we're done we can print out a screne play.

So, my kids generally cover all learning areas to some extent every month.
Even if it's just one question about the subject, it's learning and I notate
it. I just sit down each evening and I fill in a sheet that the teacher has
for us. It just lists the 7 learning areas and I just add on anything we did
that day that wasn't already listed as something we had done that month. End
of the month we hadn this sheet to the teacher and as we go around doing
things I just keep an eye on things I can use as samples for when portfolios
are due.

Last year when we went to a Civil War renactment we snapped tons of pics, we
photocopied a couple and gave them to the school as a sample for history. I
had photographs of the kids playing monopoly, playing with magnets, building
things with legos and with our marble run, working in the garden. I had tape
conversations of my son talking to the bank manager about his bank account.

Our Educational Specialist is very open to unschooling. She tells me often
that we cover more subject and the kids retain more then her other families.
I really don't know what to think about this as it's not me leading any of
this. My kids are naturally very curious. They love telling her about their
recent projects when she comes. They do this to anybody who visits. They are
rightfully proud of their "work".

I'm sorry your charter changed the way they did things. Were you with One2One?

I know what you mean about the money. The kids choose a few things they want.
This year Annea wants to take ballet lessons, so we're seeing about that
being done through the charter. Our educational specialist worked with one of
our well known professional ballet schools. Stephen wants to learn to play
violin and he wants to get involved in theater. I have told both our
educational specialist and my fiance that if the charter ever demands work
assignments from us like One2One started doing to my friend we're outta
there. For now we're able to unschool while having the protection we need
from our very troublesome neighbors.

Kimberly


Kimberly U


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]