As a homeschooler of a fourteen year old who once was a public school teacher, I had alot to let go of when I began.  My background and training had not prepared me for the joy that is homeschooling.  I loved teaching in public school for many years and still enjoy working with private and public school leadership. What my career didn’t prepare me for was how our fourth child would flourish as a child taught at home.

Sacrificing to Homeschool A Child

Not everyone has the luxury of coming home to school. Our family gave up half of our income, I’d like to say it was a noble desire to spend more time with her, but the truth was she simply wasn’t excelling in public school despite being very bright. Our daughter is visually different and in her public school experiences her learning differences made her feel dumb.  That was the straw that made it easy to decide it was time to come home.

A year later a selfish mom (that would be me) cried when her scores proved she did achieve more at home. I believe at the time I wailed “another year of solitary confinement with a seven year old?”  That was the day I learned that the way public school teaching had worked for my schedule did not have to be the way we worked at home.  My husband wisely said “why don’t you work on the schedule that works for the two of you?”

Create A Schedule That Makes Sense

A novel idea…work out a life that worked for us? The adventures began! We’re both early morning people and creatives, suddenly a whole new world opened to our planning. Gone were the Mom imposed rigidity of minute counts, subject order, etc and the focus became what worked for the learning we wished to accomplish. Oh how tossing those self imposed rules freed us to find a wonderful shared experience called learning!

Choose the Schooling Option Best for Each Child

Our family didn’t choose homeschooling all of our learners.  We have a child who is a public school senior and was in seventh grade when we began.  I guess you’d call us an equal opportunity family, we’ve graduated one from private school, two from public as of May and now one we’ll graduate from our home school.  The joy I have found is the time we spend together.

Be Creative With Curriculum and Learning Opportunities

Her learning pace fits her needs now and we’ve covered so much more than she could have ever covered in a regular public classroom with only part time adaptability options. At home, we have the advantage of a large screen for her computer and downloading books for anything she needs to look up and listen to.  She doesn’t have to wait on others as they are taught in their modality, she can be taught the majority of the time in the style she learns in while we work on her weaker modalities of learning as well. We learned when the most wonderful of events came near us and enjoyed working our curriculum to go further indepth on those subjects. Currently the Impressionists are at our local museum, so this fall we’ve enjoyed studying that period of art and history with so many rich examples from that period close at hand.

I believe each parent has to choose what is best for their child, but for those who want to know about our choice?  My answer is we’re choosing what works for each child as we go….and the best part?  When life determined the course even without my desire to change courses, homeschooling became an unexpected joy and that is the lesson we wanted to share with our children…that lifelong learning is the goal….even unexpected lessons.