We're official

Today we received our "authorization" from the county to homeschool Little Miss Sunshine.

Interesting wording since they aren't authorized to authorize us. (does that even make sense?) State law says I have to notify our local school district of our intent to homeschool and provide a curriculum description, and they have to acknowledge it. That's it. Our school district cannot say whether we can or cannot homeschool.

Splitting hairs, I know, and from what I've read on the local yahoo groups, it's a common misconception in the superintendent's office. I'm just happy they didn't request more info. For some reason I thought I didn't need to file a notice of intent for the kindergarten year, and only realized a week and a half before the deadline that I did, in fact, have to come up with a NOI (just fill in a form found online) and a curriculum description (more difficult since you don't want to give more info than is legally required as it would set a bad precedent, but since it was my first time I wasn't sure how vague was too vague). I spent some time collecting all the sample curriculum descriptions I could find, but several seemed to give too much info, while others seemed way too vague. I eventually found one I was comfortable with and used it as a template for our curriculum description before sending it and the NOI to the superintendent via Certified Return Receipt mail (so I could prove I sent it just in case it got lost and so I would know that they received it) with several days to spare.

We've got her reading and math curriculum and her handwriting curriculum was just delivered by the UPS man. We've got our activities lined up (co-op classes, exploring class, soccer, and violin lessons) and we have room in our schedule to take fun fieldtrips. It should be a fun year!

LMS showing off her Junior Ranger pins.

We plan on visiting more national parks this year and adding to her collection.