Last year was our first year homeschooling. Honestly, I didn’t quite understand how the whole process worked. All I knew was that God led us to homeschool and made it abundantly clear that we were supposed to. I was nervous, feeling guilty for pulling our son out of a school he loved and anxious about the coming year. I was even nervous about my ability to teach them. Pretty funny when you consider that I have a dual masters in elementary and special education and taught for several years. Still, this was new territory for me. Could I do it? If I did it, could I do it successfully? What I found was that I was not going to do it…alone. God was going to be there with me, guiding me, giving me the wisdom and patience to teach our children. In the process, my faith was strengthened. As a family, our faith was strengthened. This journey wasn’t about just teaching reading, math, science and history. This was about so much more. This was about our family being renewed and blessed in ways we could have never comprehended.
As a former public school teacher, I had that set mentality that I HAD to follow state standards to a T. That if 1st and 2nd graders were going to learn about plants, our children had to learn about plants. I even bought the Apologia Botany curriculum for this year. It wasn’t until a friend said to me, “Silly girl. These are your children. You get to choose the content.” Oh, yeah. NOW I get it. It only took me 180 days to realize that!
If you would have told me a year ago that I would be co-admin of a homeschool group with over 200 women, I would have thought you were crazy. But, God had other plans for me. I am thrilled to be part of an amazing fellowship with other Christian homeschool moms. It has been such a blessing! I think that is also part of what led me to this blog. God had big things in store for me. I just had to be willing to relinquish control. I am so thankful I did!
Now we are about to start our second homeschool year on August 28th. I have a better understanding of what we want to do and learn about. For our bible study, we are using lessons from Kidology, starting with the lessons on Values. This is a free program and looks incredible! We use the Abeka program for reading and arithmetic. To me, there is nothing better than the Abeka phonics program. As a former teacher, I know how vital phonics are and only wish I had been able to use Abeka with my public school students. For history we are also using Abeka, but I am bumping my son up to 3rd grade because he has a very good grasp of history and is an excellent reader. Finally, for science, we are using the Apologia Land Animals books with the Junior Notebooking Journal. I have to tell you, I might have to study this book a bit. Some of those words are a bit intimidating! (I never learned those things in school!) I can’t wait for us to start this book because the notebooking journal is chock full of fun activities! We’re looking forward to incorporating our zoo membership as well!
2013-2014 is shaping up to be an amazing year! Stay tuned to see some of our adventures along the way!
