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This is my first post on the board and I am so excited to contact other moms of large adopted and homeschooling families. We have 9 total, 6 at home of whom 4 are foster/adopted and all homeschooling. Three of them arrived as foster kids at the end of the last school year and we plunged right in with the homeschooling. I was anxious that they understand what homeschooling was all about and see what the expectations would be right from the start. So I bit off more than I could chew at first with trying to juggle the move, all the discipline issues, the adjustments of the kids to each other and to having parents, and the school on top of it all. Looking back now I feel I should have relaxed the reins a bit and not tried so hard to get stuff done in school. It's hard because the kids arrive so educationally deprived, even the bright ones, because of lack of support at home, so I had so many ideas of what they needed etc. But they're also not so thrilled when it turns out that homeschooling means there will be real expectations for them to live up to (as with other aspects of their lives)!
So I guess the trick is to have fun together with the school at first, to keep your current kids on track with their work, while at the same time giving the new kids the understanding that there will be work to do. We had great success with some of the more fun aspects of homeschooling, like reading together, art projects, writing stories, even math games, but straight math work was pretty much a recipe for head butting and crying sessions under the table. I would ease up on your expectations for yourself and the kids temporarily, but they all benefit from the routine school requires as well as the quality (LOL) time spent together doing school.
I'm interested in how others have found the transition to homeschooling for their adopted kids? My girls (7,10,11) generally enjoy all of it, math the least as there's the most anxiety built up around it, but our 12 yr old son is pretty angry about the whole thing and says I'm trying to hold him back etc. But my experience with our 11 year old daughter who's been here 2 years is that the bonding through homeschooling is invaluable, even if it is very tumultuous at times.
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