A few months after our oldest was born, I began working for a local charter school where I could work outside the home about once a week and was first introduced to homeschooling. When our first child reached kindergarten age, we enrolled him in the local Christian school and after three short weeks, we realized it was not an academic fit for our son who was showing signs progressing faster than the average 5 year old. He was learning letter/sound association when he could read and multiply and I felt we were paying for him to redo preschool. So as we drove him to school one morning we realized that homeschooling was the obvious choice, immediately turned around, and drove home…without a plan and without looking back. I called the local charter school that I work for and had my son enrolled. That was 4 ½ years ago. This year I am schooling a 4th grader, 2nd grader, 1st grader while the 15 month old pretends to school with us.
Homeschooling has provided our family with:
- The opportunity for each of our kids to progress academically at their level of learning and choose the curriculum that best fits our children's needs and educational philosophy. We are following a modified classical education but we also have some of our kids using different math programs to match their learning styles.
- Spiritual training, guidance and supervision. "Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it. "Proverbs 22:6
- A variety of extra curricular activities such as dance class, gymnastics, art class and a weekly co-op with dozens of homeschooling families.
- Music and foreign language lessons that many schools have cut out of their budgets.
- Quality family time!! School is over at the end of the afternoon. They don't have hours of worthless busywork/homework to cut into our evening time with daddy. We'll save that for soccer...and baseball...and dance! They also have more free to play alone, with each other or with friends.
- We are blessed to have a lot of homeschooled friends. Within our neighborhood or a short drive we can spend time with a number of friends with children the same age.
- Many of my friends who were in education are now choosing to homeschool their own children. This has been a great experience as we can bounce ideas back and forth and compare home education to the traditional classroom in regards to curriculum and methodology...Not that I couldn't have the same conversation with anyone else.
I love reading stories about why we choose to homeschool. Everyone's story is so different and yet very much the same. You're story sounds a little like ours. It was a typical day, drove my daughter to her pre-k class (which she was in a year early, and was bored) and instead of dropping her off I walked to the office and pulled her out of school. We had not a single clue what to do with her after that! but I knew that where she was would not work any longer. Our eclectic home school has been the perfect fit for our family. Happy Homeschooling!
ReplyDeleteP.S. :I found your blog on the homeschool hop and am now a follower.
Thanks for commenting. I always love to hear why people travel down the road of homeschooling.
ReplyDeleteI wish I had read your post years ago. I very reluctantly agreed to give homeschooling a try two years ago, and what a wonderful blessing it has been to our family. The same reasons above, and also freedom to move and travel and do crazy things :) Here from HHH.
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