I posted the first of August about our choice for school for Lily. I have been asked several times about our experiences and my plan is to share once a month on this subject. Lily is currently attending the North Carolina Virtual Academy which is part of the K12 program. Currently, we are three weeks into this adventure and overall it has been a very positive experience, in addition, Lily now answer positively when asked about her school.

First is the question about her school day. Lily has been given the freedom to sleep later on school mornings. Depending on the morning she has been sleeping til 8am but other days she is up before I leave around 7:30am.  Lily has a language arts class connect most morning from 8:30am to 9:30am.  On average she has three of these class connect sessions a day each in a different subject, these are sessions that need to be viewed. Lily likes to attend the actual class on most days but she has been able to watch at a later time on the days that we have other things going on. Our understanding is that she will need 90 hours of documented PE/Health by the end of the school year. We are using her cheerleading twice a week in addition to cooking a recipe once a week to cover this time. Lily is finished with all her school work by noon on most days. At first, she was having some problems with the idea of reading carefully during assignments. This was her biggest area of frustration. After identifying this problem, she and Matt are working toward improvement.

I have to be honest and say that we have experienced a little more problems than I anticipated during the first couple of weeks but no school is perfect, as things become more predictable for us our frustrations are decreasing.  Our first problem was the way, the first week of school was organized. Orientation did not occur until Tuesday so Monday was a kinda of find your way in the dark. This was also a difficulty day, the virtual academy started a full week before our public school so that she was doing work while Zach and Kendall were playing and still enjoying summer.  Next, is the fact that the computer listing of assignments is not consistent with the work that the teachers are requesting/presenting. It is frustrating to have to look at three different papers to make sure what you are doing is the correct lesson for the day.  Lily is very self motivated but she had some difficulty with a couple of session because of not reading correctly. I am very happy that she has been forced to slow down and read assignments before just clicking through but I can understand her frustration.  Our final area of frustration is the biggest, one of the reason we chose this route for Lily was the ability to work at her own pace, we have not seen this or simply don’t understand the process she needs to complete. Lily was able to complete all her assignments in less than 2 hours on Thursday but when I asked her about working ahead she said that she only had a list of this weeks lessons.   I hope that in the near future this aspect of the virtual academy become more understandable.