Homeschool was right for us
If you’ve followed our instagram feed, you’ll know that we homeschooled our now nine-year-old for several years. Now that he’s in fourth grade and we happen to live relatively near a wonderful school that offers an environment very close to our values and how we learn, we made a family decision to enroll him and he’s loving it.
We made the decision to start homeschooling him starting in first grade, after he attended kindergarten in a public school and for various reasons that we won’t get into here, we made the decision to learn at home! Best decision we could have made at the time!
I was so intimidated at first by the thought of having to teach all the things. What if I don’t know all of the complimentary color wheel? What if he needs to know calculus by the time he’s 7? What if he can’t name all of the types of teeth in his mouth? Take a breath girl. After reading so many articles, books, asking other veteran homeschoolers, I realized that what I was really afraid of was getting outside that public school box of teaching. I am a product of the public school system, have turned out to be a pretty decent person, but at the time had that cookie-cutter teaching method stuck in my brain. It’s one of the biggest reasons we decided to bring him home! Oh when I learned to LET GO, we learned together. There were more in-depth books, LOTS of reading aloud, both from me and him. Math games. Writing letters to family. Lapbooks. David Attenborough science documentaries when we needed some extra excitement - love him. We were able to really tie all the writing, geography, math, art, science in together, and it worked! This isn’t to say there weren’t days that I wished I could put him on a school bus to send him off for a couple of hours. Really! We all have those days when everything seems like it’s working against us. But we worked through them. Together.
We adapted during the three years we homeschooled. When he was frustrated with a math problem or concept, he could step outside, go for a bike ride for ten minutes and come back to think more clearly. If he was super challenged by any writing that we did, he could grab a snack, think about what he was pulling together and then get back to what he was working on. We have amazing science museums in the area so we could back up our science concepts with trips to these museums. We were always at our public library, checking our not only current subject matter but also whatever we fancied at that time. Cats. Lunar landing. Insects. Recycled paper projects. You name it. Our public library also has a bookstore, filled with donated and ex-library books so he would save his money and twice a month or so, we’d find books to purchase to keep.
SO all the things. Yes. We had a very memorable, fun, full few years of our homeschool career. We love that we did this and would recommend to anyone contemplating homeschooling to do your research. Read books. Find other homeschoolers (you’ll probably want a good support group). I was shy about meeting other moms and dads that homeschooled but it was the best thing that I did to find a wonderful, local group of loving parents and kids. My son has had a wide age-range of kids to interact with over these years so socialization was definitely not an issue - something that I would get asked or told occasionally by well-meaning people I’d come across who had not homeschooled or been homeschooled themselves. It’s not for everyone, I will say, but it worked for our family for the time that we needed. We had quite an eclectic homeschool that morphed in and out of what worked for us each year - a very fluid process for us.
If there’s an interest in discussing further our homeschooling experience and offering any encouragement and suggested resources, please send me a note!