Home School Curriculum Experts

Completed girls’ lapbooks for co-op history class - check.. Took son to football practice – check. Other son to speech – check. Folded a load of laundry while grading a math page and giving a spelling test – check. Sometimes it seems like my life is one ever-expanding checklist of things to do, places to go, papers to grade, bathrooms to clean, kids to hug….wait! Did I just put that on a checklist?
Perhaps I should introduce myself. As the new blogger-in-residence for this online homeschool community, I would be wise to provide some background credentials so you will know my frame of reference when my posts get crazy, and you have a hard time keeping up with which child I am on my knees about in any given week. I am a mom of five, four of whom are homeschooled, the fifth in public school (please withhold your disapproval temporarily :) We have officially been on this homeschool journey for 8 years, since my oldest son started kindergarten, although I would venture to say that the journey started long before that. No, I was not the industrious girl who homeschooled my preschoolers, but the calling and the path to homeschooling for us started soon after the birth of my first son. The arrival of a second son two years later, and then the birth of my triplets girls two years after that (more about that at another time) did send shock waves into the whole homeschool thing, but by the time my son was 5 and the others were 3, 1,1,and 1, I was not in the shape to get them all out of the house to take him to school in the morning anyway, so homeschooling it was!
I have been asked many times over the years why I homeschool. In the early years I gave people answers that I hoped would convince them of the academic and moral superiority of homeschooling. I moved from that into giving answers that would just convince them that I was doing all right by my children. In the last few years, however, I have been more honest with them, and with myself. My son summed it up the other day when we had to rearrange our schedule for co-op pictures, and we happened to be out in the morning and stopped at Sonic. “Mom,” he said, “you know what I love most about homeschooling? The freedom.” And that, for me, sums it up. The freedom to choose the curriculum I use to teach my kids. The freedom to see them learn, and to adjust their learning method as needed. To spend more time with my kids, not bound by someone else’s schedule, routine, and priorities. To “do school” outside or at the park on a day that is heartbreakingly perfect after many days of rain. The freedom to eat lunch with Daddy. The freedom to explore a subject that is not a part of a “Scope and Sequence.” To visit the nursing home, or volunteer with Operation Christmas Child, or do school at an aging grandparent’s home in order to spend time with them. The freedom to have “faith conversations” all day, not just in the morning and at night. The freedom not only to know the kids my kids are friends with, but their moms and dads and siblings as well. To watch siblings actually grow up with each other, helping each other learn (and yes, to tease and fight). The freedom to teach my child to read, and the joy when he or she “gets it” (and the tears when they don’t). It says in Galatians “It was for freedom that Christ set us free; therefore keep standing firm and do not be subject again to a yoke of slavery”. I am no theologian, and I am pretty sure that homeschooling was not exactly what Paul had in mind when he penned these words, but I can’t help but think of them when I explore just why I homeschool. Freedom....that’s why.