Home-educating~ Part I

The first time I really considered home-schooling was when my first born was about a year old.  We had recently met a family at our church who home-schooled and their kids were just not like "other" kids.  To make a long story short, we were impressed!  They seemed to have a great relationship with each other and enjoyed all ages of people at our church.  Always serving others and making it a point to be self-less.  I decided to start looking into more in depth.  I also brought it up to my husband and with a very unassuring voice, he said, "We'll see. We have a few years to decide!"  As the next couple of years passed, we still continued to interact with the family from our church and eventually met another homeschooled family.  I was still in awe of difference of the children and their families.  I knew I wanted to be a "homeschooler"!  I began to pray more and more and brought it up once more to my husband and decided to leave the rest in God's hands.  (He was still not as convinced as I was that this was the way to go.)  A few months later, when my oldest was 3, we were asked to go to a homeschooling conference.  That was what made it all official in both my husband's eyes and my eyes!  We were convinced this was the only way for us to go.  God began speaking to our hearts more and more and eventually it was not a matter of choice but obedience.  The journey began.

At first, I had the idea that I was going to set my first born down at a desk every day for half a day during his preschool years and make sure he was SCHOOLED the only way I knew, the public school system way.  And eventually, he would sit for 6 hours a day with 5 or more different subjects and we would have our little school room at home.  I was then invited to a workshop/conference in our town given by the Moore Foundation.  My little bubble I had made burst right in front of my eyes!  The approach he had was totally different than anything I had ever heard.  But God began to gently bring a peace to my heart that this was the approach that would be best for our family.  I bought the book, 'Better Late Than Early' and my husband also read it.  It changed everything for us in the way we were going to "school" our children.  A new freedom!  We decided that we did not want to say that we "homeschooled" our children, we were "home-educating".  The idea the Moore's have is that everyday is a chance to educate our children.  We don't need them to sit for hours a day, with workbooks and all kinds of curriculum to make our children successful learners.  Theme teaching (I will expend on that in the next post), waiting until children are ready to learn reading and phonics, not just saying they turned 5 and are in "kindergarten" so it is time to read now.  Were some new thoughts for us.  But it was very freeing for us to see this new way!  Charolette Mason was also introduced to us.  God was opening doors for us and as always, helping us with things that we thought were impossible! 

That is a little testimony how our home-educating journey began.  I will be continuing to expand on more details in the coming days. Theme teaching, creative idea's for using errand day's as a chance to learn even away from home, when to know kids are ready to learn phonics, and some helpful idea's to get out of the stressful mentality of having a public school atmosphere in your home and moving towards a stress-free way to teach your children to learn anything they want to learn by themselves, and how to serve in your community and how we have made that  the most important part of our home-educating experience for us and our children.

  Any questions you would like for me to answer in my coming posts or idea's for a topic, please feel free to ask on my comment page.  I would love to answer anything I can!