I think everyone can agree that the winter of 2022-23 was full of sickness, sickness, and more sickness. This was unfortunately all too true for our family as well, even more since we moved to a new city this year. New cities and new schools mean new germs and lots of sicknesses!
From Labor day until Christmas, we were getting hit with one big thing after the next with no breaks in between. Our immune systems needed a break! Desperately! How many more doctors and hospital visits could we realistically take on before we needed to draw the line?
Over Christmas break, we spent a lot of time discussing with our doctor and with each other the best steps moving forward, and ultimately what we knew was best would be pulling my oldest from kindergarten and homeschooling for a time.
It was not a decision we took lightly. This would be a huge decision that could have an effect on her for quite a while.
On Tuesday morning after Christmas break was over and everyone went back to school, we spent the day on the phone with her teacher, principal, and superintendent. Ultimately, the biggest question was, “Is this temporary, or for the rest of the school year?”
With our specific situation, it needed to be temporary. She is not the type of child that would thrive in a homeschooled situation because her social needs are more than I can ever provide her while homeschooling.
Because we chose to make this temporary, we needed to figure out the best way to move forward, whether we would unenroll her from school and then re-enroll when she came back, or how we would handle it.
But we ended up being very fortunate that as a result of the 2020 Covid shutdowns, distance learning is still an option, but this is the last year they are allowing it in our district. So a distance learner she became!
When schools shut down in 2020, I, fortunately, did not have a child old enough to be in school and did not have to take on the burden of distance learning. However, we’re getting the full effect now! We now have packets of papers to do with her, books to read, activities to work on, and more.
It’s been fun to have her home each day and it’s been fun to hone in on my inner teaching skills to help her understand new concepts. I’ve loved being more involved with her learning to read and we’ve adapted a lot of the worksheets to be more hands-on and interactive, which I know is a huge privilege we have while doing work one-on-one instead of in a classroom of 25 students.
But at the end of the day, she is one of the most extroverted humans I know (okay maybe she’s second to me), and a public school situation is somewhere she thrives, there’s no denying it. Even her teacher and her principal would agree!
We have loved this learning experience of having her home, but we’re still counting down the days until she gets to go back and spend the day at school with all of her friends and various teachers that help in the school.
