School

While Heikki is experiencing Arabian nights (and days), the children and I are enjoying one more week of holidays before India goes back to school. She's already planning what to show her class in Show and Tell. Before the school year started, I was anxious about India staying to do the first year (pre-kindergarten) again. We had agreed to that when she was accepted to the school a year early, but I was afraid staying back would do some harm to her self esteem. I was completely wrong, and doing the first year twice has done her a world of good. Most of the children in last year's group are exactly a year older than her, so she would have been way younger than everyone else, and might have had difficulties staying on the same level with the others academically. She's quite a shy child, but now she gets to shine, and doing the year again has been extremely good to her self esteem.

Due to the renovations, Matias didn't study intensively during the last part of the year, and then had a nice long summer-Christmas holiday. He's back doing school now. We started homeschool with him with a couple of aims. He had his ups and downs at school last year because of his ADD, and I was afraid his love for studying would be crushed if we didn't get him out. Our children are at school to learn, not to be crushed by teachers. According to his psychologist, he should also have been at a much more advanced level (University) for example in maths. He will also probably go to Finland to study after high school, so we wanted him to learn Finnish properly (especially the terms used in math, chemistry and physics).

I got Matias year 7 school books from Finland, and enrolled him in a school for expat Finnish children. The idea with the school is that expat children can keep up with the Finnish schools while living abroad. They study Finnish school books on their own, do exercises and exams set by a team of Finnish teachers, and correspond with the teachers by e-mail. The children can do the work at their own pace as there are no deadlines.

I knew from the start that it would be easy and rewarding to work with Matias. He loves school so getting him to study would not be difficult. He finished year 7 maths before we even started school, and it now looks like he'll do most subjects of years 7, 8 and 9 by the time the next school year starts. The best thing is, that he's happy. He enjoys studying and he loves teaching me :)