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New hybrid school program for Santa Clarita starting Fall 2015!
The great news about charter schools just keep coming this week!!
As you know, Learn Beyond The Book already partners with 10 great charter schools offering classes and social groups, fieldtrips, and more to their students and will continue to do so (Golden Valley, Sky Mountain, Gorman, SCVi, iLead Lancaster, iLead Exploration, Sage Oak, Albert Einstein Academy, Excel Academy, and Mission View Charter Schools).
I’m very excited to let you know that Inspire Charter School has partnered with Learn Beyond The Book, to provide a true hybrid program for homeschoolers/hybrid schoolers in a new Specialty Program, starting Fall 2015. There are many benefits for you as a result of our partnership. Most families will love the ability to choose up to any six of the available Beyond The Book classes each semester. These classes are available tuition free for all enrolled Inspire Charter School students. If students want to take more than the six classes, parents are free to pay the rest out of pocket.
The whole goal of Inspire is to simplify things in order to give students the best individualized education program possible. Inspire provides special education services and the teacher assigned to your student will be available for assisting parents in getting any questions answered that you might have about the program or homeschooling in general.
A credentialed teacher, assigned to the students at Learn Beyond The Book (one of our own local teachers), will be on site at Learn Beyond The Book at regular predetermined times and they will be collecting the monthly work samples, most of which will be created during Learn Beyond The Book class times from students/parents, as well as an attendance calendar, which has to be initialed by the students and signed by parents for all days attended in the month. Since the teacher will know the students from being on site, they wouldn’t have to meet with them and the parents for an hour each month. Parents also won’t have to fill out any specific learning logs. We are excited to have Kelli Mejia, a homeschool mom herself, be our first teacher!
If your student chooses to use the online courses available to them, the funding for those will not reduce your tuition-free classes. For K-8 students, K12 or Odysseyware is available and A-G approved APEX for high school students. Students in high school could replace APEX courses with community college classes and/or test out of certain courses. High School Science courses with labs done through APEX will have labs completed by attending 2 Saturdays per semester of lab time. Electives taken at Learn Beyond The Book can count for credit under certain circumstances, so please see this article for more details. High school credentialed teachers are available all week for students’ questions via phone and online and classes taught by our own credentialed teachers will be able to count for high school credit.
When testing time rolls around, all Inspire state testing will also be conducted at Learn Beyond The Book’s facility and proctored by the assigned teacher(s). Inspire doesn’t believe in teaching to the test so students will not feel pressure about that.
If students want to use funding at other vendors as well, they can enroll in a different program of Inspire with an annual budget of $1,000 for enrichment with the core subjects being done through one of the online platforms (K12, Odysseyware and APEX). In this program, students have to use the online curriculum.
There are limited spots available for the Fall, so don’t delay your enrollment if this sounds like a great fit for your family. Then also register on our site for the classes you want and put Inspire down as your school.
A free information meeting to provide you with more details about Inspire’s partnership with Learn Beyond The Book was held on July 16, 2015 and here is a partial recording of the meeting (forgot to push record right away, but what you missed is in this article).
Math classes in Santa Clarita
Are you tired of trying to get down those multiplication tables and other Math facts, frustrated because the kids are finding it so dry and boring? Do you find every day’s Math a battle to get through? Or maybe you just feel like it could be more interesting?
If so, you are not alone at all. Many homeschoolers find Math a challenging subject and they are ready to throw the towel in many days. First it is challenging because it might not be the parent’s favorite subject. However, in some cases where it is the parent’s favorite, they have a hard time teaching it and staying patient, because it all seems so easy to them and they can’t quite understand how it would be hard for anyone to remember it. An even more common problem is that parents don’t realize how much repetition goes into Math before mastery will occur.
Sometimes all that is needed in there is a little fun, but it is sometimes hard to come up with something interesting to do when there are so many demands, so many subjects to cover and children at various levels of learning.
One option you might consider to alleviate this potential problem would be to join in on one of the Math classes offered at Learn Beyond The Book. The Math teachers here love Math and love teaching it. They’ve been doing it for years and know what it takes for kids to get it down. Learn Beyond The Book offers Math classes covering all different levels, starting with Place Value, Addition & Subtraction. Then there are classes forMultiplication & Division, Decimals, Percentages & Fractions, Integers, Measurements, Word Problems, Pre-Algebra, Algebra 1, Geometry and Algebra 2. If none of those interests you because you already own a Math curriculum that works well for your child, there are also other classes to change it up, like the Logic & Math Through Games class, plus this year we also plan to host a Math Bee for Santa Clarita. We are so excited about that! If you are more interested in applied Math, some Consumer Math classes (titled “Where’s the Money?”) for 2 different ages could be interesting to you and your students.
Feel free to check out our Fall schedule to see what else is offered.
How to start homeschooling in Santa Clarita
Many people consider homeschooling and they start researching it, but it all just seems so overwhelming and they don’t even know where to start. I’ve encountered so many people like that recently. I have been doing homeschool information meetings at Barnes & Noble and will have another on Aug.10th at 4-5:30pm to help with it, but in the meantime, I thought to write an article to help people know how where to start.
Here are some easy to follow steps, although it will still take some more research on your part, so I will link it to my articles about it to make your life a little easier.
1. Decide what your goal is for homeschooling. Do you have a specific vision? Would you like to let your children have more academics or less? Is your decision mostly social in nature, e.g. not wanting certain influences, certain attitudes or character development needed? This would make a difference to what you do next. If it’s not totally clear to you, don’t worry about it, but just keep it in the back of your mind to think about. This will likely change over the years of you homeschooling as well.
2. Decide if you want to homeschool on your own, keep your own records and take care of your own transcripts, diplomas etc. If your child is in elementary school, this might not be that big of an issue yet and you can always change it later, so whatever you decide is never irrevocable. If you do want to have all the freedom possible, the best option would be filing your own private school affidavit, keep an attendance record and some work samples as well as your own report cards (easily created on your own computer).
If you would like more direction, you could pick to either go with a private PSP who will do the above for you and provide some guidance, but you will have to pay a little for it. If you want more direction, but have no funds, you might want to consider public homeschool charter schools. These are free and give you some funds for materials and classes from approved vendors. There are several options for these charters. All of them have waitlists, but get on the waitlist anyway, because you can always just not join once you get in if you change your mind or got into another one.
3. Once you picked which way you will legally homeschool, you have to do some research on all the homeschool philosophies. Here are some of the main ones:
– Traditional worksheets/textbooks
– Charlotte Mason
– Thomas Jefferson
– Classical Education
– Project-based unit studies
– Unschooling
– Hybrid Schooling (some classes and some curriculum at home)
– Eclectic (a little of everything, my favorite)
4. After you’ve determined all this, it would be helpful to observe your child and how they learn best before you will be ready to pick which curriculum you might want to get.
5. There are so many options available for curriculum, but I would suggest checkingused curriculum sales first for curriculum at a fraction of the regular cost. The internet also provides tons of free resources. If you need to purchase something, you can check out all the articles and links I have listed. Rainbow Resource and Amazon.com are usually the most affordable options for most curriculum needs.
6. I strongly recommend getting together with other homeschool moms, getting on some yahoogroups, facebook groups and meetup groups for Santa Clarita homeschooling and visiting a local parkday to get input from more experienced moms. There is a parkday every Friday around noon till about 4 at Valencia Glen Park on Via Gavola. You can come and go as you are able. If you live elsewhere, search for some local groups.
7. Know that homeschooling is a journey and you will probably change and adjust your course several times as you find what works best for each child since they’re all so different.
Good luck and I hope to see you at one of our parkdays very soon!