Why I began homeschooling and why I continue to do so...
Why I began homeschooling and why I continue to do so...
I began homeschooling my daughter when she was in second grade. She attended kindergarten and first grade in a private (read Christian) school and I was criticized because she learned to read before her fifth birthday. I didn't teach her this. She saw that I love to read and taught herself. I still remember her saying, "Mommy! B-A-T-H spells bath!" when she was two.
She had a teacher who obviously didn't like children in the first grade. I wanted to homeschool then. But, my husband didn't want me to. He said that we didn't know enough about homeschooling to tackle such a project. Looking back, I see that he was right. So, I spent the next ten months talking to other homeschoolers, introducing them to my husband, and learning as much as I possibly could learn about homeschooling.
At the beginning of second grade, the tuition was raised so high that we could no longer afford the private school. So, my husband decided that we'd put her in public school. After all, he had received a fine education from public school about 20 years before.
She was in there for exactly one week when I received a phone call from her teacher, wanting to meet with me. At the meeting, she told me that my daughter was too advanced for her age. I told her to put her in the G.A.T.E. Program (Gifted And Talented Education). She told me that they only allow third grade and above into the GATE program. So, I told her to put my daughter into the third grade for half the day and then when the year ended, she could go into the fourth grade. She said that she couldn't do that because they weren't allowed to do anything that would make the others jealous. So, I asked her what she suggested that I do. She said, "For children such as your daughter, homeschooling works better than public education because the public schools are no longer capable of teaching smart children at an early age."
I went home and told my husband what she had said. He said to stick it out. So, we did; for two more weeks. By that time, he had seen the notes from the teacher saying that our "problem" stemmed from my allowing my daughter to teach herself to read at age two and to write in cursive while still in kindergarten. He had seen enough. He pulled her out himself and we didn't look back.
I became my daughter's primary educator, with a little help from field trips to the geologist's office because she was highly interested in rocks and volcanos.
We did our school work either at the kitchen table or on the couch. And, what the school took seven hours to do, we did in a little under three hours.
In 1999, my daughter was in third/fourth grade. My husband passed away in January. I kind of fell apart. We moved from California to Indiana. At this time, my daughter blamed me for Daddy's death, so she wasn't speaking to me or doing her school work. I figured that we needed a break so we quit school early that year.
In August, she still wasn't speaking to me, so I put her in the local public school. That was the biggest mistake of my life. She went from getting A's and B's doing work at least a year ahead of her age group to getting C's, D's, and F's doing work that was her "grade level." Of course, it took me until the end of the first semester to realize that it was the school and not my daughter. So, I pulled her out.
She now does her school work pretty much on her own and asks for help when she needs it. She does it in the kitchen, on the couch, on her bed, or sitting on the floor. It's her choice. We are a cross between un-schoolers (interest-led learning) and traditional homeschoolers (schedule). Right now, her biggest interests are in weather and animals, especially horses.
She gets horse-back riding lessons for PE and we do a lot of educational television. I prefer Bob Jones curriculum to any other I've found, but tend to make my own supplements to it.
I have to say that I've stuck with homeschooling for the same reason I started. If my daughter ever gets "too smart" for me to teach her, we live close enough to a community college that I can enroll her there.
