Our Homeschooling Journey

So I have really struggled with what to title this post.  We fit so many different topics for those interested in learning more about Homeschooling.  Both myself and my husband, Jason, work full time jobs.  Jason is and active duty chaplain in the US Army and I am a physician working shifts in the Emergency Room.  We both have extremely variable schedules and this makes it difficult to carve out the family time we want with our four wonderful children.  When I was younger, I never even considered homeschooling my children.  If the subject ever came up I had the exact same questions that I now get asked.  What about socialization?  How do you find the time? Can they play sports? How do you know what to teach? Why can’t public school work as well for them as it did for you?  Then I met a man in the military and I chose a career that gave me a very atypical schedule.

I still didn’t see a way for it to work but as the time grew near for my oldest to start kindergarten I realized I had to try. I was working an average of fourteen 12 hour shifts a month including 2-3 weekends and 3-4 nights. I was concerned that I wouldn’t see Melissa for sometimes weeks once she started school because of the way my schedule worked.  In addition, we are a military family and I knew we would be dealing with multiple moves during the course of our children’s school careers.  I wanted to give them as much stability as possible and a consistent challenging curriculum.  Of course, there were also multiple stories of changes being made in the schools themselves and children getting in trouble for a range of reasons from living their faith to pointing an imaginary gun at fellow students in play.  I can honestly say I am not a fan of the new Common Core initiative and other changes including the removal of cursive handwriting from schools.  These aren’t all the reasons why we decided to try Homeschooling but they are some.  Every family has different needs and challenges and there are many creative ways to address those needs and challenges out there if you do your research.  I’m not completely ruling out the kids returning to public school life depending on our families needs in the future because you never know what the future may hold but we are taking each year and child at a time.

Melissa turned five in February and was due to start Kindergarten August 2015.  We made the decision to try  homeschooling so I decided to start in January to see if it would work for us.  When we started I was so nervous that I wouldn’t know what to teach her or what order to teach it in or that she would get behind.  I did tons of research and I will try to blog some of my favorite Resources in  another post soon.  I started out trying to design my own curriculum from different resources and quickly found that it was difficult to keep up with in light of my work schedule and I still was worried about if I was teaching appropriate level concepts and how to judge her grasp of new concepts. I had a vision of how I wanted school for us to be but no clear path.  I went back to the net and looked at online curriculum as well as online schools. I scoured blogs of working parents and military families.  I looked at all the different types of homeschooling schools of thought from Charlotte Mason to unschooling.  There is so much out there it is overwhelming for the beginner.

I finally found Time 4 Learning (http://www.time4learning.com/) which is an online curriculum program that costs $20/month for the first child and $15/month for additional children for Pre-K through 8th grade.  High school is $30/month.  We started Melissa in Kindergarten and Bobby in the Pre-K 1 as he was only 3 at the time.  It was a God Send.  The lesson plans are easy to follow and you can make your own custom schedule for each child and manage breaks for holidays and the lessons themselves are easy to follow and interactive.  Melissa loved it and was soon begging to do schoolwork.  She has finished the kindergarten curriculum and is well into the first grade lessons. Bobby has completed Pre-K1 and Pre-K 2 and started some of the Kindergarten lessons.  However, he and Eli are attending a Lutheran preschool three mornings a week and so we are not looking to fully start the kindergarten material for him yet.

We have found that a rigid daily schedule doesn’t work well for us and so we have established a weekly task list.  Melissa gets a new list on Monday that includes her language arts, math, science and social studies lessons from Time 4 Learning (T4L) with worksheets as well as her spelling words, Bible reading and the chapters that we are reading from our Charlotte Mason curriculum.  With my current schedule I am at work on Tuesday/Thursdays for 24 hours so Monday is our heavy work day.  We get a head start on T4L in the morning while her brothers are at preschool.  Some days we accomplish a lot of it and some days we are lucky to get through a section.  I will say that the task list has significantly helped with motivation for Melissa because when she’s done with her weekly tasks she’s done to assigned school work and every thing else we do is fun learning. We pick her brothers up at noon and all head for some lunch.  After lunch Eli (2) and Zachary (10 months) lay down for a daily nap.  Bobby (4) does sometimes and others he stays up with us.  We work on art, reading from our chapter books and table manners at our daily tea parties.  We spend time outdoors enjoying nature or at a minimum watching the birds at our feeder outside out kitchen window. We build forts, put on plays or dance recitals on our pretend stage, made from  large foam hardwood floor play flooring at Toys R Us, and have mock battles with light sabers, pirate swords or ninja gear. Sometimes we use this for quiet time and Lego building.  I am always fascinated by the scenes they build. Once the boys wake up its playtime and cooking dinner until Daddy gets home and then family time or finishing up work while Daddy takes over some of the play time until bedtime.

Bobby performing a Rock show on our Stage. Performance time is a fun time for everyone.  We have Ballet and Tap dances, Rock bands,  dramatic plays, and karaoke.  Everyone in the family gets involved.

We try to finish our “book” work by Thursday afternoons that way Fridays and the weekends we have time for more exploratory style learning.  We spend days at the zoo, take trips to larger cities near us like Atlanta, St. Louis, Louisville, Memphis, Gatlinburg and trips to our local parks, art studio and botanical gardens.  As a family we love Theme parks, particularly Walt Disney World, and so we have visited many.  Thankfully most of them you can find plenty of educational topics to discuss from wildlife conservation to mining for minerals using water sluices, to engineering of different types of park rides and related physics principles.

Pictured Above- Dollywood Theme Park and Parrot Mountain- Gatlinburg, TN

Over time, as I have become more comfortable with homeschooling myself, we have added in some Charlotte Mason ideals and even a lot of un-schooling tendencies.  I have recently been introduced to unique group actually based near my hometown in Virgina Beach, Va called Wild and Free (www.bewildandfree.org) which focuses on the adventure of learning.  I have downloaded their free trial bundle and am looking forward to subscribing to their monthly bundles.  I will let you know what I think as we have tried more of them.  As I look back over the last year my reasons for homeschooling have grown and my regrets for not going the traditional route have all but disappeared.  With all the other roles I fill including working mom and Army spouse, homeschooling might not look like the best choice and it is a great deal of work.  I am lucky that I have an amazing Nanny who makes sure that on the days I work she encourages Melissa in competing her daily tasks and helps her when she doesn’t understand a concept without whom I our weeks would be much more stressful.  However, even if I did not have that extra help, I would still choose to follow this path.  Watching the understanding for new concepts in my daughter’s eyes and the seeing the joy of accomplishing something that was giving her trouble or when she gets to contribute something she has learned recently to the conversation is truly magical.  Homeschooling is not for everyone but I am glad it is for us.