Back to Homeschool Week Challenge - Monday

Monday, August 6---What led to your decision to homeschool?
Why do you do what you do? What brought you to homeschooling? What factors played a part in your decision?

We started homeschooling our oldest because we just weren't ready for him to go to middle school. I had read an article in a magazine about this family that kept each one of their children home for just one year, to bond with them during the difficult middle school years. Then I started reading everything I could about homeschooling. We didn't really have any problems with the local public elementary school, so we decided to leave the other 2 enrolled there.

Then the oldest and I plunged into a World History study that turned out to be a lot of fun and that broke the ice, so to speak, for bringing the other two home. Hey, we could do this and then after a few weeks of the new school year, it seemed that we should do this for them. Neither one of the other two kid's school years were going very well.

The girl, who is always one of the youngest in her class with an August birthday (TODAY!) was 'holding her own' in the second grade when she finished it, but when they moved her up to third grade, they put her in a split class with fourth graders and told me that they'd only put the most advanced third graders the split class because they could handle the work with less instruction. Hey, wait a minute. I attended her parent/teacher conferences last year! I knew that she was doing fine, but was not advanced and not ready to go it alone without much instruction. She was the youngest kid in the class. She quickly started having problems in third grade, getting stressed and upset because the teacher hadn't told her how to do anything and the teacher's aide would only say "I'm not the teacher, so I can't tell you anything." I ended up spending around 3 hours every evening re-teaching everything to her. Meanwhile, youngest son, in first grade, was crying every day and begging us to homeschool him and my husband's work schedule was such that he only saw the kids on weekends. Homeschooling everyone was starting to look like a no-brainer.

We finally took the plunge in September of that year and we have never looked back. Not once. This way of life/schooling is just so much better, it's unbelievable. It's hard to explain to anyone who hasn't experienced it, but it's like walking all your life and suddenly realizing you could fly.

Can you tell we like homeschooling? Of course, as I write this, we've been out of school for about 8 weeks. After the whining starts on Wednesday, I might not be as quite as positive, LoL. ;-)