Thursday, June 11, 2009

why we are homeschooling

Pete and I decided to homeschool Aidan in the fall for his kindergarten year, thanks to this post. There are a lot of reasons:
  • wanting to be a large part of Aidan's learning--both in what he is learning and in his excitement over the material
  • wanting to teach him how to think critically--I don't feel like I learned this so well in school
  • wanting to make learning a lifestyle for our family, not just something that happens in a certain chunk of time
  • wanting to see his heart be captivated by God's world
  • wanting to help him catch up with some of his delays one-on-one instead of the small bits of time he got in the public school (though we LOVE his teachers from last year!!)
  • wanting to learn with him

I'm posting this here more for me, as I want something to look back on when things get hard.

We don't know if we'll do this all the way through his schooling, but at this point we are planning on it. I'm pretty excited about teaching him to read and some of the subject matter in the later years as well.

The above-linked post was the one that God used to get my attention about homeschooling. I've looked into it in the past (I wrote a paper on it in college and also wrote a book review on this book). I even got to interview Susan Card about the book. But at the time it was just a curious thing that others did.

Pete and I have always planned to send our kids to public school. We'd love to use a private school but, at this point, there's no way we can afford it. So when I read Ann's post, I was shocked at my reaction. I was shaking and couldn't stop reading it over and over and thinking about it. I finally sent the post to Pete and asked him to pray that weekend. We went on a date night (already planned) a few days later, and that's when we started talking about it. I was astounded that Pete was VERY supportive!! We did have some concerns, which we spent the next few weeks researching. We came to the conclusion that homeschooling was the best option for our family at this time.

The funny thing? I asked Aidan about what he thought about it after we made the decision, and he wanted to start right away!!

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