Our Homeschool Adventure

I posted this to  Secular Homeschool.com as a blog post on their site a few days ago. It seemed like a good place to start.

This will be our fifth year of homeschooling in September. My daughter has been home for four years and my son for two. I started when my daughter was coming out of Montessori Children's House and going into first grade. We couldn't afford more private school and hadn't been able to get her into one of the better Magnet schools. In spite of all of our efforts, she was placed into one of our local public year-round schools, but after the first two weeks I was convinced it was all a huge mistake. Was I being a little too picky and high handed? Why was this not good enough when it seemed to be good enough for all of our neighbors? Everything just felt so WRONG to me, and my daughter, who had always loved school and learning, and who loved the cooperative Montessori environment, was begging me not to leave each morning and coming home exhausted, frustrated, and with an attitude. I could see her innate joy of learning and curiosity was getting squashed by stupid rules, crowd control, socially incapable peers, and work that was way beneath her skills. I hemmed and hawwed and read everything I could get my hands on for about a month and then pulled her out at the first break, and we've never gone back.

My son also went through Montessori school and then came straight home like his sister. I think back now at how scary that decision was and what a huge leap it seemed to be. In spite of the insanity which is our schools in this area, I believe I am the only one in our neighborhood homeschooling. Everything in our society, from the media, children's books, private and public school teachers, says that you have to have a teaching degree to teach children well. Our society tells parents to hand their kids over and let the educating be done by the "experts". But isn't the interested, involved parent the expert? No child is the same and only the parents know all the little things that make that child so special. Besides, I dare say, most parents will have been on the learning journey with their kids from day one. I was going to say "teaching", but that's not quite right. Kids teach themselves SO much. How to walk, how to talk, how to hold a spoon, etc. We are just there to help them along. That is how I now see our homeschooling journey. I am there to provide the best materials and opportunities, and for the most part they learn when they are ready or when they are having fun.

I didn't start that way. I had started trying to emulate the Montessori materials and methods and trying to get my daughter to "learn" with me 3-4 hours a day. She is a very bright kid and a self learner and she made me VERY aware of when she was not happy. If I said do A or B, she would say C. It's just how she is. It took us a year to work things out and for me to relax and let the learning happen. Some days I was determined to get her to do something and we would end up yelling at each other. Some days she would take off on a million learning projects of her own devising and I couldn't keep up with her. Clearly the unstructured approach works best with her, and our yearly testing so far has proved this correct. My son prefers a more structured learning environment, but the wonder of all this is that I can provide pretty much what each needs and punt as we go. 

I'd say our style now is laid back and eclectic. We spend a great deal of time out doing classes and Co-ops. We try to explore as much as we can all the wonderful things available to us, and so maybe more than they should, sometimes the workbooks take a back seat. Every year I get to the end of the year exhausted and wondering if I'm just trying to do too much, and maybe we should be doing "school" at home more, but the truth is that I wouldn't do it any other way. I don't homeschool my kids to keep them from the world (except for maybe the grosser and age inappropriate parts of popular culture), rather, I want to show them the world. My personal feeling is that actual experience trumps book learning any day, and so out there we are. How could a school room compare to that?