elementary homeschool

Why I Chose Elementary Homeschool

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I used to teach high school language arts back before I put on my Mom hat and went to work for my children every day. I had some homeschool students come to my public school classes, and they were leaps and bounds ahead of their peers. They were intelligent, well-read, polite, and mature. I loved having them as students! It didn’t matter, though, because I thought homeschooling was weird. Totally weird. Socially harmful. Borderline child-abuse. I was also 25 and idealistic. I didn’t have any kids and thought that public education was the best and only realistic option for schooling. I didn’t even consider elementary homeschool for my future children for a second!

Then My Life Changed Forever

I had my first child, E. With that change from teacher to mom, I started to change the way I viewed homeschool. I started to look at things differently, and I worried about the things he would be exposed to at school. I worried about the buildings in the district in which we lived, and I worried about someone else who I didn’t even know spending more waking hours with him in a day than his own awesome parents.

We’ll try this thing out, see how it feels

My husband and I talked about E’s future as a student. We settled on a lovely, albeit pricey, private school in our community. It was a Christian school, so our values would be represented and upheld.

The facilities were newer and well-maintained, and the families were similar to us: concerned and involved in their child’s education, eager to volunteer their time, and more than happy to send in an extra box of you-name-it for the classroom.

We had a positive experience and stayed for several years. Even so, we eventually began to notice things that made us feel as though our child was just another dollar sign as opposed to a valuable child and a unique learner, so we decided we needed to consider other options.

A Leap Into The Deep End

Elementary homeschool came up as a viable option for us, so I began to research. I joined some Facebook groups, liked some pages, read some articles, and started getting serious about it. We decided that for us, homeschooling made perfect sense. I’m a stay-at-home-mom, we’re not thrilled with some of the things we’ve seen happening in public schools, we’re less than thrilled about the cost of another year of private school, and we have the means, (a parent at home), to make this happen.

At this point, we discussed some of our core values:

  • the importance of raising strong men
  • the value in allowing our children to play outside and remain little for just a while longer
  • the avoidance of certain trendy cultural norms

And just like that, we decided that this was happening! We lamented for several months, but we finally concluded that there were a million reasons to homeschool and not too many reasons we shouldn’t.

Are you considering elementary homeschool?

If you’re considering homeschooling, I encourage you to spend some time researching first. Even more importantly, I encourage you to carefully examine your values and beliefs. Then ask yourself if you are okay sending your child to spend most of his waking day with someone who most likely thinks very differently than you. That, for us, was enough to swing the pendulum!

What would help your pendulum swing? Why do you want to homeschool?

Drop me a message with your WHY!

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