You may remember that my Son is going to be attending High School online. Well today he received his Laptop & Printer, He was quite happy to have it as his computer went down a while ago, with a bad processor. They are Both from Dell. The Laptop (I can’t recall which make it is offhand) Has Windows Xp Professional On it which he’ll need for school as it has programs installed on it which he’ll use. The Printer also came with a stock of Ink. I Set up the wireless internet connection for him and Now he can access his Myspace and Youtube (A Must have in the world of a 15 yr old…lol). He’s really excited about starting school, I’m excited for him. He has an orientation on the 29th classes start the following week.

With our Rent paid for 2 months and most of the bills finally caught up we had a bit of reprieve financially. We have begun to look at ways to save money in long run. One idea we came up with is this: My current computer has a t.v. tuner and runs vista fine, so we thought what if we canceled our cable for now, since you can watch most t.v. shows online anyway. After looking around I found THIS COMPUTER, so we decided that we would get it and take my computer out to the living room and connect it to the t.v. For watching movies, and t.v. shows online.

The Systemax is a pretty good deal in my opinion and should run Ubuntu quite well. I’m sure in the future I’ll be updating the video card, maybe add a bit of storage. But it should be perfect for my uses. The only game I play is Guild Wars, and I know that will run fine on it.

Anyway this plan will save us about $100 a month so that should help out some.

Currently My son is in 8th grade. When we first moved to our current home, we had 2 choices on the middle school we could send him too. One which is in our district and a second which is outside of our district. We choose the out of district school, due to it basically being a better school. They provide school bus transportation and all has been well for the past 2 years.

Next year he’ll be in high school, and due too limited space we we’re unable to get him into the high school of the same district. So I began looking for alternatives, as the district we live in (well just happen to fall just shy of the wrong side of the district border), isn’t the greatest school. What I discovered was the Insight School of Washington. It’s online public high school, and there is no tuition for us to pay. They also provide each student with a laptop and printer. The school has a HUGE course catalogue, and allow my husband and I to be very involved in his education, something I really like. He’ll have a learning team which consists of His teachers, counselor and an imentor. An imentor is a person that both parents and student can go to with questions, suggestions and basically works with the entire family. He will attend classroom sessions online but he’ll also have other assignments which he’ll do on his own time. The school set’s up field trips and gatherings for the students and they also have student clubs, as well as dances (so yes there is a prom), and a graduation ceremony. Students are still eligible for extra-curricular activities in the home school district, so my boy can still do football and wrestling.

I think the biggest question most people have about an online school is “what about the social aspect of going to school??” well in my opinion, traditional school is great for younger children. Younger children definitely need to experience the kind of environment that traditional school provides socially. My Son has plenty of friends with whom he already doesn’t go to the same school with. Some he met here in our apartment complex, others he’s met in places like the mall, or skating rink(a favorite Friday night hangout). I believe at this point in his life it would be a good time to begin focusing on teaching him some self-reliance and self-motivating skills. He is 15, and next year he’ll be old enough to get a job, I’m sure he’ll make more friends that way as well. But as I said there are plenty of ways for him to be social with his schoolmates they provide Lot’s of opportunity for student interaction.

He’s very excited about attending his new high school, heck I’m excited for him. I wish they would have had this kind of program when I was in school, chances are if they had I would have graduated.

If anyone is interested you can see an overview of how the classes work, by going HERE

Well Kenzie Started His new school today and he seems have really liked it. Seems we didn’t miss out on wrestling either as this school’s wrestling program doesn’t begin until the end of January, so he’ll be able to wrestle after all. He’s also going to go out for football next year. There is online grade access but I’ll have to call the school and get a pin number and password so I can access it. At this school there is a foreign language sampler class he takes also where he’ll be learning about spanish for now. There will be other Lanquages too though we’re not sure what they are yet.

The Other day Kenzie said he had something he wanted to talk to us about, and it turns out he’s been thinking about adoption for a while, as he asked Mark to adopt him. It caught us both off gaurd but Mark was happy about it, and I suppose after the holiday’s we’re going to check on it and see what all that will entail. It seems things are going quit well in our little family and we couldn’t be happier about it. We love having Kenzie here and are glad that he’s so happy to be here.