K-12 Curriculum

Joshua got a late start this year with school it was not until the beginning of this year did we find out the anxiety was so bad we could not get him into a school and everyone including the school thought it best to homeschool Joshua at this point.  We started with the K-12 program this program is a very good program if you are looking for a typical public school education but as we soon realized this was not a good fit for Joshua.  I will tell my experience with this program but do remember a lot of people really like this program and it does work for other children just not Joshua.  One nice thing about this program is that if you have a public school in your state that uses this program you can transfer schools and then the program is at no cost but you are under the public school system and requirements and this is the way we went.  One of the things I found odd was that they do have a K-12 community and there are group field trips but they cannot count towards any of your time requirements which is kind of funny considering the public schools have field trips during school time, this was a little frustrating to me also considering I had a son that was not getting their required time limits in so how did we have time for one of these field trips.  The public school had been advancing Joshua's grade even though he was not up to speed at the grade level as we have found out and since Joshua was advanced to 4th grade K-12 sent us 4th grade curriculum even though they had all his IEP's and STAR scores which all stated he was behind so take a child with ADHD and anxiety disorder and show him school work he dosen't understand and try to get him to do it.  We did explain this to the specials teacher but we were told to keep trying and of course as anyone knows who has worked with these type of children he was shuting down and I was going to lose every chance I had to get him to cooperate.  I kind of felt like I was banging my head against the wall like with the public school they weren't even going to do their own IEP until the middle of November, Joshua wasn't going to last that long and that's when I started to investigate our options on the internet then decided to go it on our own for Joshua's sake.  I have to say that I am also less stressed without having to meet all their requirments.  I do know that in our state this program had more then doubled in a year so our teacher was actually in another state until they could hire the teachers they needed I don't know if this is a factor in what happen with us or not but I couldn't keep going to find out.  I hate to turn everybody off to this program everybody has diffrenet situations and this program is well done computer and book but you need to keep in mind that this does follow a public school type format.
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Joshua's Story

Joshua is truly a gift that has been given back to us many times over.  When Joshua was 3 days old the easiest way to put it is my son had a stroke, was dehydrated and his blood sugar was really low the doctors said his blood just turned into sludge.  Joshua came very close to having brain surgery but due to a good doctor he held off and after a couple days the surgery was not needed as the clots were dissolving on thier own.  After sometime Joshua came home with all the medications and time schedules and we were told he may have learning problems later in life but they could not determine that at this time.  Things seemed to be going well until I noticed he was trying to rollover but he was not using his left side once again to a doctor and with some messaging he rolled over and sat by himself the first time on his first Christmas Eve.  We have several incidents since his infancy where his blood sugar dropped so low he had to hospitalized but with no reason for the blood sugar drop, thankfully we have not had a problem with this for a few years but due to the doctors telling us to always keep juice in the house Joshua's real weight problems started.  We have also had some very serious allergic reactions and they tested Joshua at the age of three which is not when they will usually do this and they didn't seem to find anything he was allergic to.  Just recently we had a detailed allergy testing done and the whole time we said he was allergic to grass which the first testing didn't show a reaction is now showing up, confusing because whenever he played in the grass without a shirt we were sure to be at the hospital.  I could go into a lot more details but I think the picture is pretty clear.  Joshua has been in the last year diagnosed with ADHD and anxiety disorder plus possible mood disorder the anxiety became so bad over this last summer that we could not get Joshua into a school because of the extreme bullying and teasing that the school insisted didn't go on but what has come out in therapy says something totally diffrenet.

This is my sweet Joshua with his dog Boomer.