The secular life and homeschooling
Secular homeschooling. It's a misfit thing. Its a bit harder and a bit lonely at times until you can find "a tribe". Thankfully it's one of the fastest growing segments in the homeschool world..and if you've been following any of my blogs up to now, you know we've been doing it for awhile. We started about 12 years ago, had a few years we skipped and started up again with the youngest of the kids. All in all it's been around 8 years.
We've had plenty of time to make mistakes, find new ways of doing things, learned to think outside the box and find what works for us. You change and grow as the kids get older and more independent and then wrenches get thrown into the works..like ADHD, Dyslexia, Dysgraphia, and all these fun and weird terminologies that you have to learn to work with and around.
So why do we homeschool? There isn't a specific reason. It's more of a combination of reasons coming in to play. That includes public school funding and over crowded rooms, Knowing one of our children was ADHD (and not wanting to medicate her right away, while working WITH the ADHD rather than against it), having the kids ahead by prek and worrying they would be bored at public school, flexibility (wanna travel? sleep in? do your own thing?), freedom (no school schedule to work around, being able to do what we wanted when we wanted to do it), and watching the kids have a ball doing the homeschool thing.
What type of stuff have we tried? We've tried the online school thing (Connections academy) we've done our own thing, and have done the charter school thing (right now the doing our own thing and the charter school thing are better for our current circumstances). The Connections academy thing was so/so. It was fine in some respects, didn't work in others and we decide against going with them again unless we find that circumstances have changed and feel that it might work.
What type of homeschooler are you? That might sound like a weird question if your just starting to look into homeschooling. Yes, there are different types of homeschoolers and trying to find what works best for you can sometimes be difficult (in fact don't be surprised if it takes a couple of years to find somewhat of a groove. We've tried to be very structured and that didn't work well for us or our personality types, We've done the unschooling thing (not radical, which is a different type of unschooler) and that does work for us in many ways. We've done semi structured and that works okay for a bit, then we need a break. Right now I would call us eclectic child led interest homeschoolers. That basically means we are unschoolers with some structure around the kids (clubs, classes, group meet ups, fieldtrips, etc all have to be structured somewhat).
Next post I'll talk about where we homeschool and why we have it set up the way we do.
We've had plenty of time to make mistakes, find new ways of doing things, learned to think outside the box and find what works for us. You change and grow as the kids get older and more independent and then wrenches get thrown into the works..like ADHD, Dyslexia, Dysgraphia, and all these fun and weird terminologies that you have to learn to work with and around.
So why do we homeschool? There isn't a specific reason. It's more of a combination of reasons coming in to play. That includes public school funding and over crowded rooms, Knowing one of our children was ADHD (and not wanting to medicate her right away, while working WITH the ADHD rather than against it), having the kids ahead by prek and worrying they would be bored at public school, flexibility (wanna travel? sleep in? do your own thing?), freedom (no school schedule to work around, being able to do what we wanted when we wanted to do it), and watching the kids have a ball doing the homeschool thing.
What type of stuff have we tried? We've tried the online school thing (Connections academy) we've done our own thing, and have done the charter school thing (right now the doing our own thing and the charter school thing are better for our current circumstances). The Connections academy thing was so/so. It was fine in some respects, didn't work in others and we decide against going with them again unless we find that circumstances have changed and feel that it might work.
What type of homeschooler are you? That might sound like a weird question if your just starting to look into homeschooling. Yes, there are different types of homeschoolers and trying to find what works best for you can sometimes be difficult (in fact don't be surprised if it takes a couple of years to find somewhat of a groove. We've tried to be very structured and that didn't work well for us or our personality types, We've done the unschooling thing (not radical, which is a different type of unschooler) and that does work for us in many ways. We've done semi structured and that works okay for a bit, then we need a break. Right now I would call us eclectic child led interest homeschoolers. That basically means we are unschoolers with some structure around the kids (clubs, classes, group meet ups, fieldtrips, etc all have to be structured somewhat).
Next post I'll talk about where we homeschool and why we have it set up the way we do.
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