Our Journey to Homeschooling (Part 1)

I love and adore my sweet friend Analisa more than words can say. I could write an entire blog post about her, how much I have learned from her, and how much her family means to us, but this is a post, or rather a series of posts, about our journey to homeschooling. The reason I mention Analisa is that, for my introductory post, I have unabashedly copied almost the entire sidebar from her blog. I have done this for two reasons: 1) she is a much better writer than I am, and 2) she sums up many of the reasons we homeschool so beautifully.

The only real difference between her beginnings story and ours is that we never sent any of our kids to school. I went to college to be a teacher and have a BA in Elementary Education. I always planned that I would stay home with my kids until they were all in school, and then I would go back to teaching. I would have the summers and school holidays off to spend with them and so it seemed like the perfect plan. 

I was happily carrying out this plan and had registered Jordan for kindergarten in the spring of 2008, when to my surprise I realized that from the moment we arrived home from kindergarten registration I had this feeling in the pit of my stomach. I kept thinking about dropping my 'baby' off at school and I told Jason multiple times that I was totally going to cry on her first day of school. So I asked myself, 'Why am I going to cry when I drop this sweet child off on the first day of kindergarten?' and my answer was that somewhere deep inside it just didn't feel right. At the time I didn't know why and I couldn't have put it into words, but looking back I know that the feeling I had was a seed...just the beginning of something much greater than I could have imagined. 

Here I will turn the post over to Analisa:

Why “Every day. All day?"

I never, from the first day I dropped our oldest off at kindergarten, felt peace about taking my children to school.

I had the constant underlying feeling that my influence was over, that I was expected to be finished with my kids and give them over to strangers to take care of their training and education. I was told that my children are far better off in the hands of professionals; segregated into classrooms of same-aged children, separated from any real connection with family and adults, forced to attach to their peers who were never meant to mentor each other, separated from the elderly who impart the wisdom and knowledge of the past, labeled, numbered, graded, trained to move about at the sound of a bell.

Not only were their days now monopolized by someone else’s agenda, but when they got home their evenings were dictated to us through homework and endless activity that we are told they “need” (soccer, dance, music, etc.). I began to wonder if “schooling” is the same as “education.”

Then God planted in my heart a seed of an idea.

We have chosen not to give our children over to the culture. We have chosen to train, teach, mentor our children ourselves: not “all day, every-other day,” not “half-day, every day,” but 24/7.

Now I’m here to encourage you to question. Your answers may not look like ours —but examine what you take for granted as fact, truth, good, necessary. Challenge what the culture sells you. Question what you believe and why. Seek not the favor and knowledge of man, but the wisdom and heart of God. Investigate, inquire, scrutinize, sift, probe, search.

Every day.

All day.

I remember reading this on her blog shortly after our kindergarten registration experience and I decided that I needed to take her advice. I needed to question, challenge, investigate, inquire, scrutinize, sift, probe, and search. I figured what could it hurt and I knew that I had to dig deeper into this before I could be at peace with any decision.

Be sure to check out part 2 in which I will tell you what digging I did and how we became convinced (and convicted) that homeschooling was the best choice for our family, and part 3 where I list the books, videos, articles, etc. that we found most helpful during our decision making process.