Well, it’s now official today.  Last night, my husband and I had a long talk about our son’s education and decided it would be best to homeschool him.  Poor thing hasn’t had good school experiences in his life.  He’s in first grade and has been in 4 different schools now.  When we lived in Germany, he was in a fabulous pre-K class for developmental delays (he didn’t talk until he was 3).  Then we moved to Belgium and it all fell apart.  We had put him in the local Belgium school in kindergarten and he was bullied on a regular basis.  Since he only spoke English, he was at a major disadvantage.  I started homeschooling him that December and put him in the American school on base for first grade the next year.  In November, he came home telling me that the teacher had hit him on the head to get his attention.  We pulled him out after they refused to put him in a class where he would get a fair shake and refused to let me sit in on meetings to determine where he would be placed.  So then he went to another Belgian school in the area.  This school is a really good school.  However, there is a child who is an American who continually bullies him.  We’ve talked to his parents (makes it worse that his father is my husband’s boss) and it has continued.  The final straw was when the kid took my son’s coat into the girl’s bathroom and tried to flush it down the toilet, then pushed my son down in the hallway and ran off laughing.

My son is very sweet-natured.  He is not aggressive at all and we’ve had to instruct him to hit back, which I’m not in total agreement on.  That seems to have just made matters worse and I really don’t want my son’s nature to change to aggressiveness.  Plus, he’s still not picking up enough of the language to really improve his reading.  His math is wonderful and he’s doing multiplication, but I fear that his reading will suffer.

So now he’s back with me and I’m instructing him.  I’ve decided to have school certain days of the week.  I’m a former kindergarten/first grade/second grade/third grade teacher….so it works out fairly well with the curriculum.  I’m not concerned over the academics…just the social skills.  He really needs some buddies that I can trust not to be psycho.  For some reason, that is just a hard order to fill here.  :/