On the homeschooling front

We've been trying to think about the next year of schooling for @. Homeschooling kindergarten was exactly the right move for us. He's learned a lot. We're able to do WAY more fun stuff and family vacations than if he had been a school schedule here. Every week still has good opportunities for socialization between language lessons and playing in the neighborhood. We've kept up on academics and concentrated on things that were weak skills. I noticed today that his handwriting and cutting has definitely improved. Both were all over the place when we started and the bad writing habits he had learned from school are pretty well gone. Yay no more typewriter a's that are impossible for 30 yr olds to write. So that is all good. But that leaves us wondering about next year.

We'll be back in the states for 9-10 months while we work out details for switching jobs here. A visa change like means going out and starting over and since we haven't been in the states for 3 yrs we thought we would put that altogether. We be home in July, plenty of time to get use to the US before school starts, but we're not sure what school looks like for @ next year. Indiana has a rule that kids have to be 6 by July 1 to enter first grade. @ doesn't turn 6 until 20 August. Kids under 6 can take a placement test. Problem is @ has never really sat for a test and I don't know what would be on the test. Academically he is doing great but I don't have a grade card to show, maybe I should/could make one. And I don't know that the academics @ knows will be on the Indiana First Grade Placement test. He can name and place the 7 continents and 4 oceans but is that on the test? We're working addition and subtraction math facts but is that on the test?

I saw that a number of my teacher friends are gearing up for testing this week and in the weeks ahead. So in the spirit of testing I thought I could do a little check up on @. I looked at some basic kindergarten guidelines the other day and today we did a little pop quiz. Identifying colors, shapes, writing numbers to 100, sounding out a list of sight words, placing sounds to letters. He's got all of that stuff pretty easy. I'm not real obsessive about the whole testing thing but as we're getting ready for a move and the changes that brings, it seems like a good idea to have a benchmark.