Before we started homeschooling, I went back and forth with the idea. Unlike my husband, I had very fond memories of public school, wonderful teachers, awesome school projects that I can still remember doing to this day, and good friends that I’m in touch with.
I didn’t want my son to miss out on that school experience, but I knew that he would have a hard time sitting at a desk and that his maturity level wasn’t ready for academics. Plus, after a year of preschool, I ended up pulling him out and keeping him at home when he was 4.
So at the last minute just before school started, we decided to test out Kindergarten at an Open Classroom type setting. The theory of Open Classroom is fantastic, but it never truly worked at the public school setting we were at. Except for the friends he made, my son didn’t enjoy the school.
After he finished out the year (because we’re sticklers for following through with commitments), I immediately enrolled him into a charter school catering to homeschoolers. And it was the best. choice. we. made.
I’m thankful that the charter allows us to homeschool as we please, as long as we provide work samples and attendance records. We’re not religious, so the variety of curriculum we prefer to use was already secular.
We have a wonderful homeschool teacher that we meet monthly and she often shares sage advice for juggling more than one student plus a baby at home. She herself homeschooled her girls until they were teenagers.
We have also met some like-minded homeschooling families that we regularly meet up with, usually at the beach, or now on Zoom.
Homeschooling has been a great experience for us, and we’ll continue to do it until my kids’ choose to go to public school.
What circumstances led you to homeschooling?
