Scarlett and Leon in School

For almost a month now Scarlett and Leon have been going to public school.  I love homeschooling and eventually plan to homschool them again.  But right now I just don't feel like I have enough time to teach them all.  This whole thing kind of started because Scarlett got behind in reading.  I wanted her to get extra help from school for just reading, but the school was not willing to let her (even though it is in the DODEA policy that they will).  I decided to go ahead and enroll her so she can get caught up in reading.  I also enrolled Leon for a couple of reasons, I didn't want to send Scarlett alone, Leon is the only one who has never been to public school, and because it is more time consuming for me to teach the children who cannot read well.

Leon is in first grade and is loving it.  I had a parent teacher conference with his teacher and wasn't surprised one bit.  He is right on track and doing great and he has even made friends.  Leon was great at homeschool and in general he is pretty easy to parent.  I knew school would be a breeze for him.

Scarlett is having a little bit of a harder time.  But she is also doing just as I expected.  She struggled with school at home and she struggles with it at school.  She just really doesn't like reading...yet (I'm determined to change that).  She is also very tired all the time.  We have to leave for the bus at 6:45.  That is super early for us.  Scarlett used to not wake up until 7:15.  It is honestly hard to send her to school everyday and then she comes home really tired and grumpy and I'm supposed to get her to do homework. 

Scarlett does like her teacher though and I know that she does have fun at school. Sometimes she says that it is terrible, but I think that she enjoys her school day for about 75% of the time.  It is just easy to fixate on the hard times.  Here she is after school showing me the spoon and ketchup she scored from the cafeteria. 

 We took a couple selfies waiting for the bus on Halloween.

 The bus is the worst part about it.  School doesn't start until 8am but they get on the bus at 6:45.  It is normally a 20 minute drive to their school, but morning traffic adds to that.  Then after the kids arrive at school they sit on the bus for over 30 minutes!  It is horrible.  Basically they use one bus for all the kids in our area.  So they ride with high school and middle school kids who's school starts 30 minutes earlier. Then after dropping the older kids off the elementary kids just sit on the bus.  I think it is crazy that that is allowed.  Another major issue I have with the school is that there is only one recess!  The elementary school is gigantic.  It has about 1,200 students.  I think there are 10 first grade classes this year.

 Both kids got to go on a field trip Mikan picking.  They really enjoyed it.