First off, any of my readers who know me personally know that I always say, “Do what works for YOUR family!” And I also have to start off with saying how very, very, VERY much I respect our country’s teachers and educators. These are people on the front lines of raising the next generation, and many of them are sacrificing incredible amounts of time away from their own families, not to mention the volume of money they spend trying to give their students things the school doesn’t provide. But for our family, we wanted to do something a little different. Why did we choose homeschooling, and how is it working for us? First off, a little backstory. Nora attended a Montessori preschool at age 3, and we all loved it! Then we left the Pacific Northwest and moved to Central Valley, CA, where the closest Montessori was a 45 minute drive away for only two hours of class time. No thank you. Instead, Nora stayed home with me, and we used a program called Before Five In A Row. It was gentle, fun, and filled with reading books each week, then doing projects based on the book, a wonderful introduction to “school.” Kindergarten time came, and I was so uncomfortable with full day kindergarten for my brand new 5 year old. I saw no need to turn her over to people I don’t really know for the majority of her day. That year we worked on Kindergarten basics so that she’d be ready to go into First Grade. But then it came time for First Grade. By then, we were loving Homeschooling. Plus, my daughter met the age cutoff by only ONE DAY. And that one day happened two weeks AFTER school actually began. So my Little One would have begun First Grade at age 5, then turned 6 after school started. I felt like I would be setting her up to fail that first year emotionally at least, if not academically. We’ve just finished “Grade 1,” we are happy with where Nora is in her emotional and educational development, and I’m so excited to see where Grade 2 takes us as we begin in a completely new part of the world with very different homeschooling opportunities.

And so, the Why. The reasons are oh so many, but a big one is FREEDOM & FLEXIBILITY. Freedom from the school schedule (can I get a hallelujah!), freedom from the pressure to make sure my kid is doing what all the other kids are doing (are we signed up for the “right” extracurricular activities, playing the “right” sports, in the “right” classroom), freedom for my daughter to learn at her own pace with methods that make sense to her, freedom from book learning when hands on/experiential learning is available. Make no mistake, I love books. But how amazing is it that we can learn through a book about carnivores, herbivores, and omnivores, then head to the zoo and see those animals in action as well as actually getting to talk to docents and zookeepers without weekend crowds! Or learning about the life cycle of bees, then visiting a bee farmer, where Nora actually got to hold the hive! As we neared the end of our time in the Central Valley, Nora’s best friend and neighbor, also homeschooled, finished up her curriculum. We wanted the girls to spend as much time as possible together, so I was able to lighten our schedule. Then I sat back and watched just how much more she was learning through her play with her friend than what I’d just taught her with books and worksheets. They read books to one another, created plays, built forts and created incredible, imaginary tales. They climbed trees and created yet more worlds in the trees, they discussed birds they saw. They raided the craft drawers to create stuffed animal furniture and beds and an entire, stuffie amusement park. No one can ever convince me that Nora sitting down to do yet another worksheet on addition facts or writing her spelling words would have been a more valuable use of her time.

There are at least another dozen reasons we choose homeschooling, and those will probably show up in future posts rather than me spelling everyone of them out now! But I want to address a few of the questions I get. Number 1 is always SOCIALIZATION. I can only assume that people think Homeschool Families hole up in their homes and never leave it. That could not be further from the truth. Nora probably gets more socialization as a homeschooler because she spends LESS time sitting in a classroom filled with kids her own age and MORE time interacting in the world around her. There are park dates, group learning events, homeschool classes, plus Nora is living life with me. If I go out to lunch, she goes too, where she learns how to politely order a meal, to use polite words with servers, how to pay a bill, and how to stay in her seat for the duration of a meal. Nora is not only learning how to socialize with other kids, but she is also learning how to socialize with kids of all ages and adults.

The second issue is usually PATIENCE. “I would never have the patience to homeschool my child.” And internally, I just laugh and laugh. Patience came late to me in life and is sometimes a long time visitor, while at other times, she just pops in for a few hours. Is patience needed? Of course. Patience is needed in all areas of our life, whether we homeschool or not! Does our homeschool look like the model of patience where there is never a sharp word spoken, and we are both happily and calmly interacting in blissful communique every moment? MmmmHmmmm. Sure, let’s go with that. The reality is that there was a huge learning curve in how we communicate with each other. We have mostly great days, but there are plenty of days where we are ALL unhappy, and even days where I’ve had to stop our lessons completely to give us time to regroup. And that’s okay. Because with the freedom of homeschooling, we can work in “advance,” or play catch up. Patience is a learned and practiced gift, and I’ve found that Homeschooling actually gives me more patience, not less.

The third one I’ll address is CURRICULUM choice and my ability to teach her. Which goes along with, “I’m not smart enough to teach my child.” Homeschooling has come a LONG way in the last two decades. There are as many teaching options, programs, curricula in as many varieties of methods of teaching (books, online, co-op) as one could imagine. My problem isn’t that I don’t have enough material, it’s that there are soooooo many great programs out there, I become paralyzed by choices. Until this past year, I didn’t even know there were formalized “methods.” Until people started saying things like, “Do you do Charlotte Mason?” Ummmm, no clue. So then I had to go look up that for myself and see that, oh yes, that’s a style we use. But we use a mish mash. And we practice flexibility. If a curriculum wasn’t working, I had to let go of my Type A, checklist persona who MUST finish the book at all costs, even to the point of everyone being in tears. It took some time to learn that lesson, but now, I will happily move on to a new method or curriculum if I think Nora isn’t learning or grasping the material.

I will be sharing posts on what we do, curriculum reviews, things that work for us and things that don’t. They are OUR experience in OUR homeschool. I love to encourage and support families in their own education journey!