Two Kid Schoolhouse
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Jan. 10, 2006
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Why We Homeschool
As
usual, I am a little late catching on to things around here, but I
thought I'd jump on this bandwagon and write about why we homeschool.
First, unlike many others, my husband and I never felt particularly
commanded to homeschool. We (or rather he) started thinking about
it when our son (now 8 1/2) was born, and we lived in a terrible school district. We talked about private school. Then my husband started talking about homeschooling. Say what? I had never heard of such a thing. Everyone goes to school, right?
Well. He started researching and tossing articles my way.
We started talking about our kid and what we wanted for him, and any
others that might come along. We moved to a new state. Another
kid came along. I started reading books about homeschooling and
started to move from "I can't possibly do this" to "this could be kind
of cool."
The big epiphany came after a Saturday visit to the visitor center of
the Bonneville Dam here in Oregon. We talked about how great it
would be to go to the dam during the week when everyone else was in
school. It wouldn't be crowded! We could ask all sorts of
questions! We might have a ranger all to ourselves!
And everything just fell into place after that. Other than a
one-day-a-week adventure called "Playschool" during the preschool
years, Sunday School and classes through our local parks and recreation
department, my kids have never been to school.
As time has gone on, we see how valuable homeschooling really is and
how much more sense it makes. Our son has shown us that his brain
works a little differently than most, and the reading struggles we're
working through here would be much magnified in a school setting.
We can tailor our schooling to our kids' needs. And their
desires: if we're reading something really interesting in our history,
for example, we don't have to stop at some arbitrary time. And if
some math concept isn't clicking, we can set it aside a while.
"Readiness" is something schools just don't have the luxury of waiting
and watching for.
We follow a classical pattern, sort of, using The Well Trained Mind
as a base. But I like the idea of "identity-directed"
homeschooling which encourages tailoring the homeschool to the needs
and talents, skills, and personality of each child. We use a
variety of resources, including many, many books (from the public
library and our own) and lots of good literature for read-alouds.
We keep to a daily routine, most days, but don't have a hard-and-fast
schedule.
Of course our
homeschooling is not perfect. My boy hates to write and I'm probably
too lax in that area. He'd be writing more than 2-sentence thank you
notes if he was in school, and probably not suffering from it. We
have our frustrating days.
But
they are increasingly outnumbered by the good days. My kids aren't
burned out on learning, they can pray and talk about God anytime they
want, and we can snuggle up with really good books every single day.
And, I don't have to pack a lunch!
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Musings of a slacker homeschool Mom
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• Jan. 11, 2006 - Good for you!