Starting Our Journey

I never intended to homeschool. I didn't know much about it, but I knew it wasn't for me. I'm not patient, I don't like a lot of structure and I'm bad a record keeping. Additionally, Casia was such an intense child from very early on, always asking questions, making elaborate games and structures, wanting to experiment, requiring explanations for everything, that by the time Kindergarten was around the corner, I was eager to send her off to school. I needed the blissfully quiet 2½ hour break!

Casia is my oldest child and I really didn't realize how far ahead academically she was when she entered school at four years and nine months. I knew she was bright, and fairly sure she was gifted. After all, both my husband and I were identified as gifted in school. Casia was an early reader, but not exceptionally early. She had a few sight words at age two, she could sound out many words at three, but then her reading stalled for awhile because she was frustrated with words that didn't follow the rules. When she picked it up again at age four it started to take off and by the time she was five years old she was reading short chapter books like the Magic Tree House series. At six years old she began the Harry Potter series and finished the whole set within eleven months. Now, at age eight and a half she is reading at the high school level. Shakespeare and Dickens are among her favorite authors.

In math she was also advanced. She knew how to add, subtract, multiply and divide while still in preschool. She understood fractions and could add ¾ plus ¾ by the time she was four. She learned to skip count and tell time to the second on an analog clock before she turned five. I knew that was ahead of the curve for kindergarten, but I really had no sense of how far ahead. So I felt confident that the local public school would be able to challenge her properly-after all, they told me they could.

In Kindergarten we ran into a few problems. Namely, Casia grew to hate reading and math as the year progressed. She was reading chapter books but still had to sit through early reading exercises. Because she was young for her grade, making the cut-off by just a couple of days, her motor skills were behind the other children's. She was still writing some of her letters and many of her numbers backwards. She struggled to write neatly. For these reasons, her teacher claimed, Casia was not ready to do more advanced math or reading work until her penmanship caught up with her reading level. We were disappointed with that response to our request for more challenging material, but we did not know enough to better advocate for our daughter. We also rationalized that it was just half-day Kindergarten and left plenty of time for enriching and educational activities after school.

Looking back, it should have been obvious to me that a traditional school was going to have trouble meeting Casia's academic needs.  Within the first week of 1st grade, Casia, in her boredom wrote all the answers to the simple arithmetic problems in base two, just to make it more interesting.  While other kids made patterns out of star, star, circle, star, star, circle, Casia made patterns out of prime numbers and squares (as in square roots). She became obsessed with Greek Mythology and even made a 'family tree' on our dining room wall of all the Titans, Olympians and other minor gods and heroes connecting the pictures she had drawn of them to one another with strings to show the relationships. I guess at this point, I should have known school was going to be a difficult fit, but still, we kept trying.  

We requested to have her tested through the school. Casia's test results were astounding. The psychologist said she has never seen another profile like Casia's and probably never will. Casia was given achievement testing that placed her at >99.9 percentile and an IQ test which placed her clearly in the profoundly gifted range. She hit the ceiling in six of the ten subtests and her lowest subtest score was two standard deviations above the average. During this process, I spent some time doing research on testing and gifted education so I could get a handle on what all this information meant. What I found is that there is no 'typical' gifted child. They are statistically rare and vary in their strengths, weaknesses, temperaments, and interests. What that meant to me as a parent of such a child is that there was no manual on how to proceed, and sadly, not a big support system.

I thought that with the test results in hand, we would have an easier time getting differentiation in Casia's curriculum. Unfortunately that has not been the case.  Gifted education isn't even an option in our district and the way their 'Enrichment' model is practiced, it holds little value for highly and profoundly gifted students. Over the last few years of advocating, the most we were able to get from the school was multi-grade math acceleration (a skip from 1st to 3rd and then a second skip from 4th to a combined 6th/7th grade program) and a whole grade skip from 2nd to 4th grade.  None of which was sufficient to challenge Casia and ultimately, none of it really dealt with the real issue at hand with regards her education.  That is, it's not the level of the material but rather the pace at which it is presented. She grew most frustrated in school because of the repetition, lack of depth and overall pace with which new material was presented, and this was across content areas.  

I have been through many frustrations in dealing with the school, teachers, administrators and feel as though I hit a brick wall. I've had to listen as the professional educators made statements like, "They all even out in third grade," and "Giving your daughter special instruction is elitist and unfair to the rest of the children," and "Don't worry about her academics; she's doing fine.  It's more important that she fits in socially."  I've been watching her intellectual abilities languish, her work ethic deteriorate and her overall attitude towards education turn from excitement on her first day of Kindergarten to apathy by the end of 4th grade.  It has been very disheartening and I have often felt like I am failing her.  

So this is what has brought me to this point.  I never intended to homeschool, but the more I have learned through my research, the more I feel that this may be the best way to meet Casia's educational needs.  I've got a plan in place, all the paperwork has been submitted to the district and I have been arranging social and extracaricular opportunities for her. So here we are.

It's official – we're homeschooling!