When our family began our homeschooling journey in 2021 we had a first grader who had never attended in-person school, instead she completed Kindergarten remotely through our neighborhood public school. Then we enrolled her in a public online elementary school in Massachusetts after we were off the waitlist midway through her first grade school year. The handful of months we spent homeschooling she managed to get very far ahead of her peers. We all loved the experience our daughters had at our neighborhood school but were faced with a dilemma: send our children back masking because they have an immunocompromised parent, and once they were there likely as the only children masking, they were already a grade ahead in each subject. It didn't make sense to our family to put them through this when they were thriving so much already in the homeschool environment. We continued to ask them each year as we submitted our homeschool plans to our district if they wanted to keep going the way we were and it was a resounding yes. Our daughters always loved school and learning; we never wanted to give them a reason to say they didn’t like it. Since many gifted students declare school “boring” at a young age, we did everything we could to avoid that fate.
After three homeschooling years we now have a “fourth grader” who is reading at the level of a senior in high school, above grade level in math, completing college-level philosophy courses, high school level Latin, sixth grade science and history, as well as teaching herself any musical instrument she can get her hands on and composing her own music. If she were to integrate back into a traditional classroom, to say she would be bored is an understatement.
By developing a personal learning plan for my child I’ve been able to support her learning and ensure that she continues to be challenged by her schoolwork. Both the structure and flexibility of Kalexedy allows her to have the much-missing social element to her school day as well. She also gets to work on her public speaking skills, collaborative skills and teamwork.
Personal learning plans, by default, look different for each student; they’re personal, after all. At any given moment we can have a student looking through a microscope sitting near another student writing a story on the couch while their classmate in a beanbag chair is completing a difficult coding course. My favorite part of the day is doing rounds midway through an academic period and seeing their breakthroughs in debugging code, reading their stories and seeing what they’ve discovered. When something is too easy for a student I am able to communicate with their parents to let them know that their curriculum might need to be adjusted. As an academic mentor I value the ability to close the communication loop with a parent on their child’s learning. This methodology ensures that each student is challenged by their work and has been key to everyone’s success here.
My advice to any parent designing a learning plan for their child is to meet them where they are; they need more support in some areas and may fly through other topics. They’re not expected to stay on the same level as the rest of the class. They can work ahead, they can follow a passion to keep working on a subject and take a dive deep into something they’re interested in. This is the type of learning we encourage; the same type of learning that we do as adults – the detailed analysis and the comprehensive exploration of a topic. So we’re not just supporting middle school and high school students, we’re encouraging lifelong learning by giving them the tools they need to keep discovering wherever they end up in life.
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