Apr. 30, 2007
Welcome to my back porch!
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I hadn't really planned to start a new homeschooling blog at this time. Then I got notification of a talk on Maya's Mom about this place, posted by a friend of mine, whom you might know as Pinky Mommie, and the time just seemed right. I suppose a little introduction is in order. My husband and I first talked about homeschooling about the time we found out we were pregnant with our first child. Our boys (now 10 and 8) wound up going into the public school system for some dubious 'education'-al experiences. The straw that broke the camel's back on that one was when the school failed to protect our oldest from being assaulted on the playground by four 8 year old classmates. When we went to the district over the school's handling of the attack, the school's administration retaliated by calling CPS. We withdrew our boys 3 days before the end of the school year and later moved from the area. We began homeschooling that autumn, much to the chagrin of our parents. As we were not farther up the socio-economic scale of success, they reasoned, we could not possibly handle adequate teaching of our children. Indeed, we found homeschooling a lot more difficult than we had imagined. After a couple of months, my father-in-law's influence lead my oldest son to actually sound excited about riding a bus to public school and continuing there. I respect my FIL very much; we just don't happen to see eye to eye on schooling issues...and that's ok. DS1 and DS2 started at the closest elementary school to where we were living at the time in November of that year. One or two days into the experience, our oldest was again asking to come home for school. We, as parents, decided that he needed to stick it out until the end of the year. DS1 has ADD, his eyes are weak and has inherited migraines from his father, his father and his father's mother. DS2 has SPD (sensory processing disorder). We moved during the following summer to another town (actually only about 7-10 miles away from where we were before), and again, after a brief and unsatisfying stint at the new elementary school, decided to homeschool. There are several differences this time. The two biggest differences is that DH's mother is supportive (only after a friend of hers in Florida began homeschooling) and we joined the Homeschool Legal Defense Association. |