new beginnings - home school 1st week.

What a week.

Last week after much consideration we decided to home school our 7 year old son. From the time he started preschool he has hated in - but once you- get him the system you can't get out as they try and up your play sessions without realising you have choices. Although it can also be a time when parents may secretly think - yippee its m tyime now.

However after months of dragging him and the leader asking why we won;t wear a coat in the middle of winter, we then followed on to primary school and reception class. At his trial day he already decided he didn;t want to queue for school dinners and wanted to take packed lunch. Reception was a crosss between again dragging him in and some ok days - he was invited to parties and had his own but these were not enjoyable experiences for him or us. He hated the noisy play areas when they played the loud birthday songs and loads of kids were running around, although he had enjoyed quiet visits with me when other kids were at school as a toddler.

Then in Year 1 we asked teacher for a meeting to discuss his reading as he could still not read and showed no interest in sitting down to do any schoolwork at home - in fact it took us all everning to calm him down after the day. After meetings had been put off with absent teachers etc we finally saw a teacher April towards the end of year 1 with a child pysch and we mentioned some of the above. We tried to steer the meeting towards the question could there be something here (dyslexia etc) but the school/pysch said they did not like to label/assess until 7 so would review in sept/oct when he had had time to settle in year 2 when we all agreed to try harder wiht his reading.

In year 2 he spent most of sept with swine flu systems et and constipation, then we had the bad snow during december/jan. Finally after 2 weeks of snow in january and my son asking everyday if it was school. Sometimes we could say no, sometimes we did not know as "watch this space" was issued until 10 am then changed to closed. We had had that many parents complain of school closure they were scared to and again this did not help our son psych. himself up for the day. He also got severe constitpation again during that 2 weeks had we had multiple dr apts.

We finally decided why are we doing this to him and ourselves when it is severly affecting his health physically and mentally so we decided to remove him.