As a homeschooling parent one encounters many ideas of what how "home" and "school" fit together. Some consider homeschooling tantamount to abuse and assume that we do not actually teach our children proper academics. Others are condescending as they ask with great concern about socialization and the abnormality of my child's learning environment. Some tip their hats to me and say they wish they could do the same and a few beautiful souls smile at me and say the best decision they ever made was to homeschool their son or daughter.
This journey is a work in progress for us. My 6 year old has been in public and private kindergarten and we chose homeschool as we saw her joy in learning starting to die. Some kids do fine in a classroom environment but others, especially those kids who tend to think outside the box, are constantly impaired by the necessary structure of a classroom environment. Add in social distraction, meaningless "busywork" and provincially dictated curricular goals and you have a mix that for some children is actually toxic to real learning.
Academics:
My daughter is a strong-willed, creative, perfectionistic, people-pleaser. In our homeschool we are able to find topics that she is excited about and build in our language and math goals. Sometimes we have to sit down and just push through workbook pages to get it done; but the advantage of our school is that we can often do that in half and hour and then we can move on to the subjects that she is most passionate about. We can go directly to the library or the internet to look up information, make a learning plan and design a learning activity co-operatively! For my daughter, this allows her natural creativity to be expressed without being hindered by her perfectionism and tendency to look over at what someone else is doing and copy them. In grade 1 we have done: math cooking lessons with fractions, writing through grocery lists and letters to relatives, music and dance through our stereo and a cleared out space in our living room, we do research on animal behaviour and homes and build models using materials from our recycling box or pantry cupboard, and reading ALL THE TIME!
Socialization:
First of all I have 3 children so my children are learning positive play and conflict resolution behaviour everyday! Secondly as homeschool has become more common there are great co-op groups and even community centre programs developed specifically for our kids. My community also offers public school support for home-schoolers so we are enrolled with a local "distributed learning" school where E attends classes with a co-hort one day a week.
Wishes - Anyone can do it:
I wish I could really show these people who say they wish they could homeschool just how accessible h/s is. There are so many great resources available that no matter what your personality and teaching style you can find an approach that works for you. If you want to facilitate h/s but are not sure that you are capable of planning the curriculum and assessing your child than enrolling with a distance-learning or distributed learning group is ideal. In my local system we get the learning plan in the beginning of the year and meet with the classroom teacher three times a year to present our portfolio and he/ she creates a report card for the student. There are also great programs that provide everything you need for your academic year in a big box (Sonlight is one I know of but I'm sure there are others). For the more creative types you can always plan your own curriculum and just look up your provincial or state education standards to find out what specific points or learning markers you have to cover.
Homeschooler Community at large:
To all my fellow h/s parents out there, I commend you and thank you for the many blogs and groups that you help create and maintain! I have learned so much from you all and have a few blogs that I constatly turn to for inspiration:
http://www.se7en.org.za/
http://belladia.typepad.com/crafty_crow/
servingfromhome.com
The h/s community tends to be very co-operative and desires to see each other succeed. Each h/s student that does well in university or life in general paves the way for others to do the same.
