Our homeschool story ~ part 1 ~

A few weeks ago I wrote that I would be writing some homeschool posts this summer and one of the things that I wanted to write about was why we homeschool.  I’ve been thinking about how to approach this topic and I realized that I just wanted to tell our story…our story of how we became a homeschooling family.  Inside of our story, you will see our reasons for homeschooling and how they have changed over the years.

Eight years ago, I had just finished my first year as a stay at home mom.  At the same time, my oldest son was about to begin Kindergarten.  David and I began at that time looking into homeschooling.  And not because our hearts were led that way.  I did not want to homeschool.  I had just finished eight years as a public school teacher and I was still feeling the burn out that I had experienced during those last few years.  We were also anticipating the birth of our third child and I just didn’t feel I could handle teaching my children at the same time.

However, we began to research homeschooling and were finding out what course of action to take when we were offered an opportunity to move back to the city.  Not only would we be closer to David’s work, we would be in an excellent school district. 

We moved and two weeks later, our oldest baby began Kindergarten.  He had an excellent two years at our local school.  He made perfect grades, received awards, and was selected to participate in an organization for students that excel in their school work. 

While our oldest son was in public school, our younger son was in a preschool at a local church a few days a week.  He had a wonderful time at this preschool and we saw him flourish in the loving environment.  He had really wanted to go to the same school as his brother when he was four years old.  However, the school accepted the students who scored lower on the test first.  So he returned to the church preschool for another year. 

In March of that year, we received a call from the early childhood teacher that our son could start the preschool program and finish out the last two months of school.  They had many children drop out and our son was next on the list.  We asked our younger son what he wanted and he wanted to go to school with his big brother.  So we left the church preschool and headed to the public school preschool. 

Stay tuned for part two…