public school/public funds for EPGY ...

[serendipitous journey]

... esp in California.

 

We school through a charter in California (Pathways). I saw a mention of finding public funds for EPGY and thought I'd ask if anyone has ideas, experiences, or advice before I try for this through our charter (which lately moves with glacial slowness on my e-mails and requests, and is pretty opaque in its workings and decision processes -- to me, at least).

 

We only use the charter b/c it gave us a lot of $$$, but the funds have dropped precipitously this year, so I would be happy to jettison the charter if that makes it harder to get support for EPGY; but all else being equal, I thought it would be easier to do this if we are in the system somehow as opposed to being registered as a private school (in CA, homeschooling independently involves registering with the state as a private school).

 

thanks for any thoughts! (and, generally, thanks to all y'all ... I'm so grateful for the support & help & ideas I find here :))

[Bang!Zoom!]

Ana, you and I run the same rails often, ever notice that? :)

 

I'm going to have to sit and sort EPGY from square one. What is it that you feel EPGY has to offer for the kids? I remember vaguely that the ALE here was not yet qualifying for EPGY, but was attempting to...

 

I was (emphasis: *was*) going to sit and go through the pages of this site I'd marked for reading today- but I'm obviously not going to get to it. You might want to throw this in your things to browse list..there's some breakdowns of districts/regions/programs within the US..but that's not the reason I'm most interested in it..

 

It drops names/emails here and there, and that's what I want. Real people and contacts. I don't want to go and reinvent the wheel on the stuff that looks likes needs done.

 

There might be something in there for you as a side trail.

 

http://www.accelerationinstitute.org/Resources/Policy/By_State/Default.aspx

[serendipitous journey]

Ana, you and I run the same rails often, ever notice that? :)

 

 

.. I did think you have a sharp eye for an interesting thread ... :) (and I am glad of your posts!)

 

I haven't thought EPGY through deeply yet. Mainly I'm tossing it 'round my head because math is such chaos with Button: we keep hitting glitches due, I'm pretty sure, to developmental things while his conceptual apparatus runs ahead ... Essentially, I thought it would be nice to use a curriculum designed for accelerated children, as opposed to accelerating through a standard curriculum.

 

ETA: thanks for the link -- I'm going over that now ...

Edited September 9, 2012 by serendipitous journey

[Bang!Zoom!]

I don't know enough about epgy to talk about the effectiveness or worth.

 

But I do wonder if from what I've read means that the math portion is made up of mostly screen instruction.

 

Do you have any sort of leaning on how he best learns in math, what suits his style?

[serendipitous journey]

 

Do you have any sort of leaning on how he best learns in math, what suits his style?

 

He seems to learn it well generally; I haven't really played around with modalities. I often explain things to him; some he learns after working problems and noticing a pattern. I do not think he'd be up to AoPS-style self-instruction from a text at this point.

[quark]

... esp in California.

 

We school through a charter in California (Pathways). I saw a mention of finding public funds for EPGY and thought I'd ask if anyone has ideas, experiences, or advice before I try for this through our charter (which lately moves with glacial slowness on my e-mails and requests, and is pretty opaque in its workings and decision processes -- to me, at least).

 

We only use the charter b/c it gave us a lot of $$$, but the funds have dropped precipitously this year, so I would be happy to jettison the charter if that makes it harder to get support for EPGY; but all else being equal, I thought it would be easier to do this if we are in the system somehow as opposed to being registered as a private school (in CA, homeschooling independently involves registering with the state as a private school).

 

thanks for any thoughts! (and, generally, thanks to all y'all ... I'm so grateful for the support & help & ideas I find here :))

 

Ana, we have tried EPGY through the open enrollment option. What I've gathered through the years is that the two programs (open enrollment and the non-op. enrol.) have slight differences but I'm not sure what they are exactly because I don't know families who have tried both.

 

When we tried EPGY math through open enrollment, we were very surprised to realize how many glitches there are in the program. This was my son's very first experience with an online math program. He was about 6.5 or 7-ish, at the peak of his fine motor challenges. The math was incredibly easy (I think I started him off at Grade 2, bumped him up a level a week or so later and bumped him up another grade level another week later) but he would hit a wall with geometry problems not because he didn't know the answers but because he just could not maneuver his fingers to click the correct points or draw the lines through the correct points. He worked around it after a while, sort of figured it out, asked to borrow my fingers (he would tell me where to click etc) in some instances. In the meanwhile, he was racing through the other problems until I bumped him up to 6th grade level.

 

Finally, after about 3-4 months of pottering about with it, I called it quits. I could keep bumping him up (I think they had just introduced algebra for open enrollment students at that point) but I eventually decided to forget about it because:

a) I wasn't comfortable with the acceleration at the time

b) I didn't like the program and the only reason my son liked it was because he actually enjoyed figuring out the glitches, not the math

c) We were having so much more fun with living math books, logic puzzles, using the whiteboard (our preferred way to learn), MEP, Key To Workbooks and LOF.

d) We just couldn't find the time to use the language arts portion because of my son's many, many interests and preference to use his time reading living books instead of working on the computer

 

That said, I know families who use their charter funds for EPGY just to make sure gaps are addressed. I am a little too cheap to use EPGY for that purpose so I didn't follow suit.

 

Not sure how helpful this is. Good luck.

[serendipitous journey]

Quark, thanks so much! That's just what I needed to know. It sounds as if EPGY won't gloss developmental issues (of immature nervous & muscular systems) to allow the child to work at cognitive level -- at least, not more efficiently than what we're doing now. And we're based in Singapore Math at the moment, so I'm not worried about gaps. Thanks again.

 

I'm just tired of struggling with Button -- who, unlike most precocious mathy ones at this age, doesn't love doing math: he just cracks up without it, so we go at it regularly. I'd love to outsource it. Well, frankly, right now I'd love to outsource the child :tongue_smilie:but DH and I are convinced that he'd just be a discipline problem in a brick-and-mortar school. An unhappy discipline problem.

 

thanks again! I really appreciate your insight & help.

Edited September 11, 2012 by serendipitous journey