Assignment: This would be a good week to tell about your worst struggles with a lifestyle of homeschooling.  Tell about something you’ve struggled with and how God’s mercies gave us the strength to get past it.  Also, share any curriculum/homeschool methods that have been a relief to you, i.e., a particular Teacher’s Manual or Homeschooling method that’s been easier for your family.  Talk about how you felt when the burden was lifted and Oh, What a Relief it is!

Memory Verse:  Psalms 55:22 - Cast thy burden upon the Lord, and He shall sustain thee; He shall never suffer the righteous to be moved.

I think the hardest thing has been homeschooling in a place where I have little support near me. My parents and other family members I know are supportive of us homeschooling and many friends back home from our church and other places are behind our decision to homeschool our kids on the mission field. Even our co-workers here are supportive but there is no one near us that actually homeschools. That is hard. I grew up with there being homeschool families all around us at our church, in our town or near us so that my parents and us kids were able to encourage each other in what we were doing.

I don’t have that here and that has been one of the worst struggles for me in homeschooling.

One of the biggest ways God has encouraged me personally was to help me find Homeschool Blogger. Articles written by homeschool parents are encouraging but blogs tend to be much more open about what daily life is really like for us homeschool Moms. It is a relief to read that I am not the only one struggling with teaching their son to read or get another son interesting in doing penmanship. It’s a relief to find ideas and tips that don’t cost me a lot and help me as I plan our homeschool.

Even though there is nothing that can replace time spent face to face with another Mom who’s homeschooling to talk about and encourage each other, it has been so great to be able to do that to online. Reading and commenting back and forth with other Moms on their blogs, asking questions and sharing advise on forums like at The Homeschool Lounge, emailing with new friends…the Lord has really blessed me with that encouragement! I also makes me appreciate my friends more who I know back home that homeschool and take the time to email or call them to encourage each other. I have come to realize the importance of speaking up and sharing what’s really going on with our homeschooling so others can pray for me and for me to ask how they are doing and lend a listening ear when they need to share their struggles.

The Lord also blessed us this year with a missionary family that came to live here! They were here from Jan. to July and we loved it! They have kids close to the ages of our kids so it was a chance for them all to spend time with kids from their own culture who speak their language and are the same thing…missionary kids and homeschool kids. And of course we Moms just loved being able to talk homeschool! She encouraged me so much and shared her advise about curriculum they use and even left some of their books with us when they moved. It was just what we needed this year! I love how God knows that and brings along what we need just when we need it.

The other main area I have struggled with in homeschooling is curriculum. Having been homeschooled I thought I would just use the same books my Mom used. I really loved the way she taught with KONOS and Saxon Math especially. For younger grades I really felt that the Phonics program she used for my sister was great and the one method for teaching math to little kids was so great…but I was frustrated with some of them as I began to use them. I still think they are great curriculum but I was running into all kinds of problems. KONOS relies heavily on getting and reading books from the library. That worked at first when we were still in the United States but living in Peru that was just not going to be possible. I fought with it for a while trying to make it work, but without the access to all those books it just wasn’t working.

There were struggles and issues with the other books as well. Mainly because some of the things suggested or the number of books needed made them not very portable. As a missionary family first heading to the field we needed to think about space!

So I spent a lot of time looking into what other curriculum was out there and trying to figure out what might work for us.

That is when I found Math U See for math. I was wanting something that taught in a similar style as Saxon Math and yet had manipulatives for the early grades especially.

Math U See does and soon after we began using it they came out with DVDs. This has been so helpful for me since math is a subject I struggle with and was worried about teaching. It’s nice to have someone else do the explaining and then I can just help the kids follow the instructions given.

Alpha-Phonics was a book suggested by my Aunt and it has been great so far with my first two kids. It’s also just one book. We have also used this book many times in tutoring our Peruvian friends in English pronunciation. I highly recommend this book for that use! And really it is great for teaching any age of person to read.

The rest of our curriculum that we use now, we found through trial and error.  When it came to penmanship my oldest was struggling so much. It was so much work to write and he just had no motivation for it. I did a LOT of reading online to find something that might work for us and we ordered “Italics Handwriting” to try. WHAT a relief! The kids love those books and they have nice italic style handwriting now.

History and Science were a struggle for me to find just what we wanted. Shane and I discovered after spending hours discussing how we wanted to teach that what we really wanted was something in the classical style. Teaching history chronologically and teaching science in somewhat the same way but with the main idea of studying a subject thoroughly. After more research I found Story of the World and we’ve been using that now for almost 2 years and love it! Then this year our new homeschooling friends who were here shared what they were using for Science….Apologia. Wow! That is just what we were looking for! So we are borrowing their books this year and will be buying them for ourselves next year when we are in the U.S. to bring back with us.

For English we began using First Language Lessons for the Well-Trained Mind for Arel and at the suggestion of my Aunt we tried Easy Grammar for Dane and have decided to continue using that!

And while I am sharing about curriculum, we also have started using Writing Strands and find that it is very good for giving a bit of a plan for how to go with creative writing. Something we plan to focus more on this year.

 So that is some of the way the Lord has encouraged me and helped me in my journey of homeschooling. I share it all not only to remind myself of all these things but to also encourage others who might struggle with some of these same things. I would also say that I spent a lot of time pouring out my heart to God about all of this and he answered me! And he did it in ways I least expected.

A verse that ties in with this and has been a huge encouragement to me lately is Ephesians 3:20 – “Now glory be to God! By his mighty power at work within us, he is able to accomplish infinitely more than we would ever dare to ask or hope.”