For six days officially. I spent the past pre-homeschooling month freaked out and excited and overwhelmed and in denial. What is crazy is that I actually am a certified elementary school teacher who has never really taught "regular" school. I did some substitute teaching. I spent a year in a paid internship program working with struggling readers. I spent five months in the public school system as the reading coordinator. I learned a lot from those experiences about a lot of different things. I quit the city job after giving birth to daughter number one and I've never gone back.
I can't believe we're barely into this thing. It feels normal-not unfamiliar or difficult. It has been a lot of fun too. Being a stay-at-home Mom for the past seven years had left me in a place where I honestly didn't know what to do with myself sometimes. I love reading so that fills in some gaps. Homeschooling has redefined my stay-at-home Mom purpose. It gives me guidance and offers me inspiration. Maybe I just needed a hobby...for now, place value, dinosaurs, story elements, and oceans and continents are that hobby. Nature walks in the middle of the day when all of the other kids are at school has been fun-kind of like playing hooky, but we're not. We're outside learning and enjoying ourselves because we can be. We get to define what learning is. How we learn, when we learn, what we learn, and where we learn-it is all up to us.
I think one of the biggest things that gave me a tremendous amount of anxiety was choosing a curriculum. There are SO many to choose from! Curriculums, methods galore, blogs and blogs of experience and opinions, just so many options it overwhelmed me. I was afraid of making the wrong choice. I was, after all, taking my child out of the regular school system because I believed that I could educate her better than a bunch of workbooks could. I borrowed a friend's curriculum to look it over. It was okay. I discovered that I didn't like reading a huge book that told me what to teach, how to teach it, questions to ask, activities to engage in, and on and on. Why did I think that I needed that? It was exactly what I don't need!
After researching (for years!) about homeschooling, good websites, books, curriculums, and talking to lots of homeschooling friends and basically driving myself crazy, I finally found the website and book that made all the difference in my life. What I had been looking for (again, for years), I had finally found. It was MY answer, maybe not yours. It is The Heart of Wisdom Teaching Approach to Bible Based Homeschooling by Robin Sampson. I'm still reading and rereading it. It is so good. I love how Robin compares the leaving of the public school system to the Exodus out of Egypt. Egypt is the public school system, The Promised Land is homeschooling. She goes on to say that we (home educators) sometimes remain in the wilderness (like the Israelites) because of fear. This book is just amazing to me. It encompasses far more than just homeschooling. God please don't let me lose my enthusiasm!
Taking charge of my daughter's education just makes sense. Any parent with the desire to educate their child is qualified to do so. I do not feel any more qualified to educate my child because of my education. Although it is nice to be able to throw, "Well, I AM a certified teacher" into those fun conversations in which I'm questioned as to WHY I just don't let "qualified" teachers educate my child.
As far as curriculum goes, I decided to take it subject by subject. I didn't purchase an all-in-one curriculum. I did buy a math curriculum. I found the standards for what second graders need to know in 3 different places plus a book and have cross referenced the heck out of them-fear of not doing enough! The library is my best friend. It is free, kid friendly, and offers what Charlotte Mason calls "whole books". Charlotte Mason's approach has also been a big influence on me. I discovered her a year or so ago and was happy to find an entire chapter in The Heart of Wisdom dedicated to her ways.
We have decided to take homeschooling one year at a time. We'll see how far we go. I'm already excited about unit studies I want to teach two years from now! Right now I'm enjoying teaching second grade stuff and realizing that just like my daughter, I just don't really like dinosaurs all that much! The horse unit study we're planning does excite me and my girl. I can't wait!
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