The Threat That Became Our Reality-Part 1

I have recently joined a couple of home school Facebook pages and I have been watching as many new people are taking the leap to home school.  I know how scary it is. They have so many questions and they are looking for any help they can get. I've been there and it is quite overwhelming to know where to start. After seeing so many people searching for some direction, I felt like it was time to share my journey in hopes that it can help even one other person.

Four years ago, my oldest daughter was being quite grouchy with me as she was getting ready for school one day and I turned to her and said, “If you don’t start changing your attitude, I am going to pull you out of school and home school you next year.” Now I had no desire to home school at that point and had no way of knowing what her response would be.  But alas, she turned to me and said, “Good. I want to be homeschooled.” I stood there dumb founded. I could not even say anything. I just stood there in shock, wondering what had just happened. Wow, that didn’t go how I planned.  I took my three kids to school (K, 3^rd, and 4^th grade) and couldn’t even bring myself to say anything about our conversation at that time. But I sat wondering, WHY? Was she being bullied at school? What would make her WANT to be homeschooled?

When I picked up my children from school that day, I finally asked her about it. “Were you serious about wanting to home school next year?” She answered, much calmer than that morning, “Yes.” And at that time my 3^rd grader pipes in excitedly, “I want to be homeschooled too.”

“But, why?” was my reply.

The answer that came was most unexpected. She told me how bored she was in school.  How she finishes her work super fast and then is required to sit doing nothing for an hour as she waits for her class mates to finish their work.  And how she isn’t even allowed to read a book or draw, she just gets to sit and wait. How often times she was asked to help the other kids understand their work. How school is just too easy and she wants to be challenged and move at her own pace. And how the kids who didn’t do their homework at home the night before, are given time at school to do it, while those that did are given other stuff to do while the others catch up. How she felt that was a waste of time, and she would rather be learning other things. And her list went on and on, and all the while my 3^rd grader is chiming in his agreeance to everything she was saying.

I had no idea that was how school was for them. I knew they were smart and at the top of their classes, but I didn’t realize they were sitting around most of the time and bored. They never thought to tell me this before. And I never thought to ask questions that would bring these responses out. I was shocked at what good reasons she had for wanting to be home schooled.  I was also relieved that it wasn’t because of bullying or anything more serious.

I told my husband about the whole discussion that evening and his response was an automatic, “You’re not home schooling”. I got a little defensive and said, “I know. I’m just telling you what happened.” To be honest, homeschooling was far from my mind and I could understand his misgivings out it. You see, that year was the craziest year of our lives. My fifth child was about 10 months old at the time, he was born with seizures. We had been in and out of the hospital with him, and were having to see multiple doctors who were so hard to get into you had to accept any appointment time given to you (which were often very inconvenient). Plus we had Early Intervention coming into our home 2-3 times a week. He was on medication that slowed him down developmentally, caused numerous other problems, and caused sleeping problems.  I was not sleeping through the night and was extremely exhausted and stressed with his situation. To add to it, my 5 year old went to half day Kindergarten, which meant I was constantly at the school dropping kids off and picking them up from school. To say the least, I was a MESS!

Life was CRAZY for me, I could barely pull myself together (just ask my neighbors). And then the kids drop the bomb on me that they want to be homeschooled. “Are you CRAZY?” I thought, “I’m going to explode any minute and you want me to go even crazier.” I thought it would soon pass, so I didn’t ask again for another week. And then I waited another week and asked again. Each time it was the same answer, only they were more excited each time I asked. So the only thing I could do was to go pray about it.  And the answer came.  Yes, I was supposed to home school and I was told through prayer that my life would be much easier if I did. I didn’t know how that would be possible, but I trusted in the Lord and made the decision to home school. Though my husband wasn’t exactly thrilled with the idea at first, he also received a confirmation that it was what we were supposed to do.

I had only a few short months to prepare as it was coming closer to the end of that school year. At first, I thought we would just go with K12 because it was free. As I thought more about it, I thought, I will do all K12 except I want to pick my own history books because I don’t like how the public school teaches history. And then I thought, well and I also want to pick my own math for my kids. So I will do all K12 except history and math.  But it would be fun if . . . (and that was the end of my considering K12). If I was going to home school I wanted to pick my own curriculum and do it how I wanted, not how I was told.  So I set to work, discovering all I could find out about home schooling and different curriculums.