Homeschooling has been a great thing for our family! My kids are second generation homeschoolers. Both my husband and I were homeschooled during high school. Now we aren’t against public education in anyway. We are what we like to call PRO education, choosing the best of all available options for our kids. In our case the only options we had to choose from were public school or homeschooling so homeschooling won. If we lived somewhere different where there was access to Immersion Language schools, Waldorf or Montessori schools, charter schools, etc. our kids’ educations might look different than what they do now.
As it is, we live in such a small town there aren’t any violin teachers and Laura and Ira take guitar lessons from my dad via Google Hangout. Thank goodness for technology! And thank goodness my parents made sure I had great piano teachers and am able to teach all my kids the piano.
Because we do homeschool I’m always interested in why others do it too. This graphic covers a history of home-schooling beginning in 1977 discussing important waypoints along the timeline to the present day. Did you know 3.4% of school aged children are now home-schooled? It has doubled from 1.7% in 1999. The graph shows the reasons why so many parents have chosen to home-school, with the most frequent reason being that they are concerned about the environment of other schools. Our top two reasons would be “moral instruction” and “dissatisfaction with academic instruction at other schools.” There are also tips for starting the home-school process. Click on the image to enlarge it and read it better.
Source: Early-Childhood-Education-Degrees.com
How do you stay involved with your kids’ education?
I love hearing about how others decided what kind of schooling to do. I think we’re going to homeschool my oldest in kindergarten next year. She has a birthday right at the cutoff and I’m completely undecided what to do after that. Continue homeschooling? Send her to a public or charter school? For kindergarten II or into first grade? For now we’re going to see how homeschooling goes for both of us.
It can be so hard to figure out what to do with those with cut-off birthdays. Good luck with homeschool and whatever you decide to do afterwards. You being involved no matter what is a HUGE advantage for her!
I have five children. 4 of which are in public school. We choose to learn at home with one of my girls. It just works better for her because of the way she needs to learn. I am so grateful that we have choices when educating our children. I wish all the time that it was easier to home school but I also know that hard work pays over time.
I was talking to my sister the other day and through that conversation I decided to quite stalking and start joining the conversation. Have loved your blog for years. Thank you for all your encouragement.
Thanks for leaving a comment, Emily! I wish we had more choices for education where we live but we don’t. One of the downsides of living in the boonies. 😀
For years, I thought that homeschooling was a fine choice for others, but not for me. I thought it would be another thing to add stress and chaos to our already hectic life. Still, I thought about it occasionally and admired friends who chose to do it. After a time I started to think, “if I truly was convinced it was best…maybe I could make the sacrifice.”
The surprising thing, to me, was that after months of reading, pondering, praying, discussion with my husband and friends, etc—I suddenly had the thought: what if this is not an extra burden you’re required to take up, but the *solution* to the burdens you feel now? That was the beginning of my whole worldview shifting. I gradually realized that while family life is always challenging, there are many ways you can *choose* which challenges you take on. It made a huge difference to our family’s well-being when we chose to exchange some inconveniences for others that, to US, were more palatable. Of course it’s not the right thing for everyone, but for me, the challenges of homeschooling are invigorating and exciting rather than exhausting. I’m so grateful we decided to give it a try!