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A flyer in my youngest child's therapy office caught my attention while I waited for the appointment. Tech Trep - personalized, online home education, business and tech focused were the buzz words that reeled me in. Curious, I looked into it.
Tech Trep is a public/private online academy. Students are enrolled in a public school district and are required to meet certain learning goals throughout the year and participate in core classes (in K, it's math and language arts and after that it's math, language arts, science and social studies) plus they have the opportunity to take elective tech and business courses.
The most amazing part is that the parents/students get to choose the curriculum for the core classes and the academy reimburses the cost - with some exceptions (Notably you cannot have religious curriculum reimbursed, you can teach it as your core curriculum, just not get it paid for).
I brought all this information to my kids Miss 7 and Mr. 5. They were both excited and ready to go right away. They checked in with me while I was working on enrollment to see if they were in the school yet. Once I confirmed they were, they each sat with me and we worked out what they would agree to work on this year. This is what we worked out:
Miss 7 - Core Classes
Language Arts: Using the Brave Writer curriculum as a guide, Miss 7 will work to improve her writing skills by reading novels and using their companion guidebooks, "Arrows", to become familiar with literary elements and by working on 10 writing projects throughout the year in the Jot It Down program. We will also continue to read just for fun by alternating an Arrow book with a Just for Fun book. Mom agrees to read the Writer's Jungle to prepare to support with a language rich environment.
Social Studies: Miss 7 has developed an interest in learning how to speak Spanish and in learning about countries where people speak Spanish. Using DuoLingo, Mango and other supplemental materials Miss 7 (and family) will learn to speak conversational Spanish to each other. We will also study Mexico, Spain and several other Spanish-speaking countries through unit studies. I still love a good unit study
Math: I like math, but I'm not a good teacher of it as a whole...so Miss 7 requested a real curriculum. We tried out Teaching Textbooks and she loved it so we're going with that, plus PBS Kids Math Games and board games. Miss 7 is also saving up for a pet so she'll be learning money management this year.
Science: Miss 7 said she wanted to learn chemistry this year. The Tech Trep Academy provides Generation Genius membership for us and we'll be purchasing membership to Mystery Science. Both include much more science that just chemistry in case we want to explore other disciplines this year. I love Mystery Science especially because of the way Doug uses questions to provoke experiments and then walks the viewer through the experiment within the video. We are also planning to purchase 2 chemistry lab kits (should have enough experiments to get us through the year!).
Miss 7 - Electives
Keyboarding: Tech Trep Academy has their own keyboarding classes they provide for the students enrolled but on the first day of school, the access to the actual keyboarding class hadn't been provided yet, so I set her up with TypingClub.com. She loved it! The next day, when she didn't have keyboarding on the docket, she asked if I would sign her in to it again. She also asked me to try one of the ninja challenges - it was really hard!.
Digital Design: Tech Trep Academy has a Digital Design class that Miss 7 is very excited to start, but just like the Keyboarding class it wasn't ready on the first day, so I set her up with her own Canva. She's been using mine for a long time so getting her own was very empowering.
Hip-Hop: This dance class is entirely separate from Tech Trep Academy but Miss 7 tried it this summer and loved it enough to ask to continue this fall.
Mr. 5 - Core Classes
Language Arts: Mr. 5 has been frustrated lately with not being able to read like his big sister, so his goal this year is to learn to read. I've told him our plan will be to read together, just us, everyday and I will help him learn to read new words until he figures out the sounds. We'll also be using the Brave Writer Jot It Down with him since writing is a part of Language Arts that he can already do, if he is told what letters he needs to write to say what he wants.
Math: For math Mr. 5 is playing PBS kids games and managing his allowance (5 bucks a month! Woohoo!) . He's been playing an Odd Squad math game that requires him to quickly decide if a number is over or under another number and it was really hard for him a few weeks ago. He worked on it recently and came running to me to say he'd done it on his own! No help! Those are the kind of goals we'll be working on this year.
Mr. 5 - Electives
Lego Robotics - This class we also don't have access to and I'm pretty sure it's going to be the one I feel most out of my depth in. Something about Lego Wedo and making robots out of the Lego pieces. He's ready to start as soon as we get access!
It wouldn't be fair to expect the kids to work hard to learn new things this year without me working too, right? My job this year will be to keep on top of recording the things the kids do and submit the weekly learning logs to their homeroom teacher online because, my favorite thing, I'm the one who gets graded by Tech Trep, not my kids - at least not directly. As long as they do things and make some progress and I report that progress they pass!
My kids get to learn what they want to learn still and I get held accountable for making sure I support their learning goals. So far, I kind of love this.