Our journey through homeschooling began in the fall of 2006. This post will be an introduction into that journey and will be followed by a series of posts which will take us through the winding paths of it.
Without going into too many details, we had heard about homeschooling while we were living in Texas c.2000-2004. There were a couple of families at our church who were homeschooling. It didn't interest me at all at that point, although we briefly considered looking into it at the end of the 2003-04 school year. I was easily convinced by my oldest 2 children that we didn't need to do that.
It wasn't until the fall of 2006 that life threw us a curve-ball and it became necessary to pull our oldest son out of school at the beginning of his 11th grade year. The other children were in grades 8, 1, and preschool/toddler aged.
We began with just the 11th grader doing a correspondence program, following a traditional educational approach via DVD lessons. Throughout that fall and winter, our 1st grader kept asking why he couldn't homeschool too. He wanted to stay home and do school like his older brother. He was doing well in school. He was keeping up with the expectations just fine and got along well with the other kids. But it wasn't home and he had experienced a couple of uncomfortable situations and small complaints that he'd shared with us, and we just chalked it up to normal school experiences. In the meantime, I was learning that I really could do this. I had always volunteered in the schools, always spent lots of time invested in my kids and their education, so seeing how simple it was to do with the right tools, I began to consider bringing the first grader home too.
Soon after he returned to school from the Christmas break, he came home upset. He had a friend that he used to talk to on the playground. Both he and his friend were from Christian families and liked to talk about God together at recess. They had been told by their teacher that they were not allowed to do so. I gently explained that the teacher was wrong. He was allowed to talk about God at school, she wasn't. But I could see the doubt in his eyes, and knowing what an obedient child he was and how much he liked to please his teachers, I was immediately impressed with this thought, "No matter what we say at home, he will listen to them and try to please them there." I realized just how much the other adults in our so-called "village" could have an impact, for better or worse, on our children's beliefs and I wasn't ok with that. Especially since the aforementioned curve-ball fell right into that area of behaving one way away from home and another way at home and church. I shared my concerns with my husband and he agreed.
At the beginning of the Spring semester we brought him home. We purchased a 1st grade traditional curriculum, built him a desk and I started teaching him myself at home. Soon afterwards, I started purchased a pre-K curriculum to start teaching our 5 year old to read. Within weeks not only was she reading, the 3 year old was too. All doubts as to whether we were cut out to teach our kids at home were gone. At the end of that school year, the 11th grader got his GED and finished his high school education at that point.
In the fall, we started our 9th grader on the same DVD correspondence course that the older one used. She continued with it through graduation. It was a good fit for her and helped her achieve her goal of attending University to pursue a degree in music.
As for the rest of us, we began an enjoyable exciting adventure into exploring so many of ways an education at home can successfully be accomplished. Those ways will be explained in more detail in this series.
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