I grew up going to traditional public school in Missouri and was never homeschooled a day in my life. My husband was homeschooled, attended private school and attended public school all at different points in his schooling career. When it came time to start discussing school for our kids, homeschooling came up pretty quickly. Never in a million years did I figure I would be the homeschooling mom. I actually ended up really enjoying it though, and we have stuck with it! This year will be our fourth year with our oldest and second year with our second oldest. We have learned a lot along the way!
Coming from a traditional school mindset, it was kind of a hard adjustment having so much freedom.
Being able to do school on our time and around our schedule was almost overwhelming. It takes a lot of structure and dedication to do school when you could be doing five million other things. I learned very quickly that I was going to have to focus to make sure we accomplished what we needed for the year. Our first year I only had two kids, a kindergartener and a toddler, so that wasn’t terrible. We pretty much stayed on track with days off here and there. Our second year proved to be more challenging since we added a new baby into that mix. A special needs baby that had many appointments, at that. We ended up missing a lot of days out of busyness and let’s call it what it is – laziness. This led to us not finishing school in time for ‘summer.’ We schooled through the summer and took three-ish weeks off before starting our next year. Third year was pretty similar because we were pregnant with another little babe. I was determined to finish before he was born, but that didn’t happen since he came a little early. We just wrapped up our school year last week and will order our next set of curriculum soon.
I have found that schooling all year works for our family.
It helps because we have that freedom to take the day off when we need to for an appointment or family fun day. You can also find us doing school on Saturdays because we don’t have anything planned. When it is eleventy billion degrees outside, we can be inside doing school and take a ‘fall’ instead. And one of my favorite things is that since we don’t really do summer, everything isn’t crowded when we finally decide to take time off. It works really well for us and we have come to enjoy it! It has been a mindset shift for me personally but one I have gladly gotten used to!