It wasn't very long before I stumbled upon the Letter of the Week by Confessions of a Homeschooler. This site is AMAZING! Her Letter of the Week program was just what I was looking for. The entire curriculum was all planned out and there were lots of fun activities. There was even a schedule to give an idea of how to go about doing something like this. This was perfect! Especially since this is my first time ever doing anything like this. Now, just a note here. I have never, ever, ever thought about or have ever wanted to homeschool my kids. The only thing I ever knew about it was the one family I knew growing up who homeschooled, was weird.
When I started my search for preschool ideas, there was no intention of homeschooling beyond preschool. I was so impressed and excited as I looked over and learned about the LOTW curriculum that I started to look at other things that Confessions of a Homeschooler had to offer.
As I started to read some of her posts I began to feel more confident in my abilities to teach my son, (still just thinking only about preschool). So I kept reading. I checked out a few books on how to homeschool preschool from the library, the more I read, the more I felt I could really do this. I was getting really excited to start.
As I was trying to do as much research as possible before deciding to jump into this, I started to feel more and more drawn to the idea of the possibility of homeschooling. At first I was mostly just curious to see what others had to say about it. So I read blogs, borrowed some more books from the library (this time on homeschooling older children), I talked to friends and family, and talked to some friends who are or have been school teachers. The more I did this, the more and more drawn I became.
My list of reasons for wanting to homeschool began to grow very fast. And my list for not wanting to began to shrink even faster. I soon found myself thinking I could really do this, and I think I might want to. Then came the big step, I needed to talk to my husband about it and see what he thought. We had never discussed homeschooling before, and I don't think either of us had ever thought about it much before this. I found myself hoping that he would be interested. So I started telling him the things I had read about, my lists of pros and cons (which was like 20 to 2), and any and everything else I could think of. I wasn't really surprised when he told me he was interested in it too, (he is very supportive of me and all my craziness). I was really excited. So I did some more research.
In the midst of doing all this research, I had started to do "school time" with my son. It was going pretty well 85% of the time. I was learning a lot about my son and myself very quickly. And not surprisingly, my list of pros for homeschooling continued to grow and my resolution even more so. Even though we hadn't made the decision of whether or not we would homeschool past preschool, I found myself defending homeschooling like mad. I had a new found respect for it. When it seemed like we were leaning much more for it than against it, I decided that this year with my son would be our test. If we could survive this year, and if I didn't feel like pulling out all of my hair, we would go forward.
We made this decision about 2 months ago, and ever since then I have found myself feeling more and more that this is the right path for us. So we will continue on this journey and see where we end up. We have a lot of hopes and are very excited to have our family grow in this way. I can't wait to share with you our reasons for homeschooling, but I think that will need to be the next post. :)
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