{"id":6075,"date":"2014-10-02T07:55:44","date_gmt":"2014-10-02T11:55:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/?p=6075"},"modified":"2014-12-17T16:20:43","modified_gmt":"2014-12-17T21:20:43","slug":"happily-homeschooling-florida","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/2014\/10\/02\/happily-homeschooling-florida\/","title":{"rendered":"Happily Homeschooling in Florida"},"content":{"rendered":"

We are now a full two months into our homeschooling adventure<\/a>, and it truly has been an adventure!\u00a0 From learning about dinosaurs while standing in their tracks in Denver<\/a> to navigating the common core <\/a>and what it means to us, we are finally getting into our groove.<\/p>\n

The great thing (for us) about homeschooling in Florida is that it\u2019s soooo easy!\u00a0 File a letter of intent to homeschool with your superintendent, keep a portfolio of your child\u2019s work and provide an annual evaluation of progress to the superintendent and voila!\u00a0 Done!\u00a0 (The official Florida statute can be read here<\/a>).<\/p>\n

No rules to follow, no standards to meet, not guidelines or restrictions on how, when or what a homeschool student should learn.<\/p>\n

I entered the world of homeschooling families with little preparation and support but wasn\u2019t really worried about it.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been bumbling through it, using my background in education, to work through our days.\u00a0 My homeschool environment is probably not as structured as some or as regimented as people might expect but it\u2019s working for us.\u00a0 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 \u201cIn the Homeschool Zone<\/a>\u201d).<\/p>\n

Aside from a few struggles with Honeybun not wanting to do work and claiming she \u201chates school at home,\u201d it\u2019s been working well for us and it has lived up to the expectations of all the reasons we chose to homeschool<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But I do sometimes doubt my ability to handle this huge task I\u2019ve undertaken.\u00a0 I sometimes worry that it\u2019s not going to work and somehow we\u2019ll come out on the other end worse.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

I chose not to purchase a $300+ full curriculum for 1st<\/sup> grade.\u00a0 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\u2019t feel it was a good investment at this time.\u00a0 Instead, I started with a few full-year packs from teacherspayteachers.com<\/a> (one for language arts and one for math).\u00a0 Honeybun completed the full language arts pack while we were in Colorado and we\u2019ve touched on most of the math topics.\u00a0 We\u2019re two months in, we must be missing something, right?!?!<\/p>\n

\"SONY<\/a>So this weekend I tackled the portfolio portion of my homeschooling curriculum.\u00a0 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\u2019s work in it.\u00a0 I took the time to read each standard and match her completed work them.\u00a0 I now feel soooo much better about what we\u2019ve done and where we need to go!\u00a0 I can clearly see what we\u2019ve accomplished and what we still need to cover and can plan accordingly moving forward.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Science and social studies are not officially part of the Common Core curriculum so we\u2019re just studying what we\u2019re interested in at the moment.\u00a0 We read about different topics of interest and do related projects.<\/p>\n

Another two months and we\u2019ll be looking at Christmas and who knows where we\u2019ll be!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We are now a full two months into our homeschooling adventure, and it truly has been an adventure!\u00a0 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6086,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[284],"tags":[368,285,200,85,369],"class_list":["post-6075","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-home-school-zone","tag-1st-grade","tag-homeschool","tag-preschooler","tag-school","tag-vpk"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6075","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6075"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6075\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6783,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6075\/revisions\/6783"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6086"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6075"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}