More Lessons From The Home Schooling Front

You scored as Christian. </td> Christian 85% Buddhist 70% Jewish 70% Anarchist 65% Cult 50% Catholic 50% Religion created with QuizFarm.com

Huh. Wonder why it doesn't have the options "Atheist" or "Agnostic".

Things I Learned At The Homeschooling Meeting Yesterday

• Home schoolers can get discounts at many places because we bring our kids in during 'off-hours'
  
• Ottawa University not only has a dude who, as part of his job, liasons with home schooling kids who wish to attend Ottawa, but they are trying to market themselves as "The University Of Choice" for home schooled kids.
  
• If you are a teenager who has not gone to regular high school, universities want you to show good SAT & [other acronymical test] scores, and hopefully a couple of evaluations that were not done by your mom (eg good marks in a correspondence history course), but that last is not necessary unless you're applying to a specialized or competitive program (eg engineering)
  
• If you never sent your kids to school, you don't have to tell anybody they're home with you.
  
• If you pull your kid out of school, you have to send a letter to the Board telling them so, and a nice man from the Board will contact you to make sure you're following some kind of curriculum and to try and gently coax you to return your kid to school.
  
• Nobody knows why I was not told either of these things, nor why I had never even heard of the nice man. I just filled out the ticky boxes on the forms that came home with the kids at the end of last year ("for staffing purposes, please let us know your plans for next year"). I ticked Justin's [X] Returning Next Year and Daniel's [x] Not Returning. And on the line that said "reason for not returning" I wrote "home schooling."
  
• There are somewhere around 20,000 - 30,000 kids home schooled in Ontario. We think.
  
• In Alberta, the gov can reimburse home schoolers for educational expenses up to $1200, providing you have receipts and are willing to provide the gov with paperwork detailing your curriculum.
  
• In Ontario the gov spends about $7500/year for each student in public school.
  
• Exchange re. playgroups for the little ones:
  Mom 1: I'm out in Orleans. We're the weird ones on our block.
  Mom 2: Me too.
  Mom 3: We're all the weird ones on our blocks.

All Too Soon

Um... I could write about my day, I guess.

Got up, Chris went to work, boys stayed home, chatted with ninja_kat (who's still pregnant), biked to Guy's house to bring him lunch stopped at the library for French books on the way there and at Malabar's for ballet shoes on the way back and at the park where we got a nasty shock because the trees ringing it have been torn down and replaced by bulldozers and after the shock I read my articles while Daniel did some math & English and Justin ate and then they played and chatted with ninja_kat (whose younger sister is no longer still pregnant - baby boy born today!) and then we left our bikes locked up together because Daniel's wheel was loose and my chain had come off (again - gotta get a new bike) so we walked to Fabricland and got the Halloween costume fabrics and off to the grocery store and lugged our food home then stopped at home for 30 min so the kids could play on the computer and then it was off to school for Meet The Creature Night and then to Beavers to drop off Justin then back home to do more of my readings, get Daniel to finish his Social Studies work and make dinner and then off to choir while Chris took Daniel to pick up Justin and came home after they were all asleep.

***
Or I could write about how, on Monday, I had the kids all day and then kept them with me for most of the evening after Chris had come home from work, and made dinner while he studied, because I was going to attend the HBLN parents' get-together at 7PM.

And then I could write about how, on Tuesday, I had the kids all day and then kept them with me for most of the evening after Chris had come home from work, and made dinner while he studied, because I was going to visit with a couple of other home schooling moms around 8PM.

Or reiterate that today, I had the kids all day and then kept them with me for most of the evening after Chris had come home from work, and made dinner while he studied, because I was going to attend choir at 7:30.

***
But I'd much rather share a totally gorgeous song we're learning in choir, about the Maritimes. It's actually two separate songs, one sandwiched into the other, both beautiful. The bread part of the song is very simple and sweet, the filling is a multi-part rolling thing that really makes you think of the ocean. Which is convenient, seeing as how it's about the Maritimes. A little sad, in that it mourns a way of life that's disappearing, but somehow it's uplifting too.

Great fun to sing, too :)

All Too Soon, Traditional Celtic Tunes, Stephen Hatfield

No one's in doubt that the children singing
All too soon shall be women and men
And the bonny new land
That we shaped with our hand
It'll roll to the ocean again.
( More lyrics )