Starting a New Journey: Homeschooling!

If you would have told me at the beginning of 2020 that I would end the calendar year as a homeschool mom, I would have laughed. I’m not saying I have never considered it… but it wasn’t anything on my radar. But, then again, I don’t think anything that’s happened in 2020 was on anyone’s radar…

Remember when we were told that quarantine might last until Memorial Day and we all flipped out?!? Who would have ever thought we’d be inching toward fall with the continued requirements to wear masks and practice social distancing.

I want to start out by saying, making a decision for your child’s education during a pandemic is TOUGH. Honestly, I don’t think this is a decision we should have to be making, period. I mean, who asked for this pandemic? We fully intended to send Luke and Eden to our local public school where they would have entered 1st and 2nd grade. Adam was signed up to attend his first year of preschool at the same school Luke and Eden spent two years of their young lives. But in walked 2020 and out walked all of our plans.

We decided to pull Adam out of preschool first. Even though I have full faith in his school and know the class sizes are smaller and sanitation will be at an all-time high, we were nervous sending him with his respiratory issues. Plus, he’s only 3-years old and can still get a full year of preschool in before entering kindergarten.

Then our decision to send Luke and Eden back started to shift. If we send them and don’t send Adam how are they any less likely to bring something home? They aren’t. They’re kids. We don’t expect them to live in fear and fully intend on them living as normal as possibly lives.

We opted to send them back to school virtually. Meaning all of their work would be done over the computer via Zoom and Google Hangouts. This is still a wonderful option school districts are offering. And sending children back to school full time is a wonderful option for parents who choose it. Again, I know how touchy and political this topic can be and I want to avoid that as much as possible. Personally, I felt really uneasy with how things were going… I chatted with a few friends who were opting for homeschool and decided to do my own research.

After a lot of reading and a lot of soul searching and a lot of hypothetical situations, I decided to take the plunge and pull the kids out of our local school district to homeschool.

I chose My Father’s World curriculum for science, history, geography, social studies and art. We chose Saxon Math (even though it’s on backorder until October… I’m not complaining, ha!). We are using The Good and the Beautiful for reading and handwriting, and Rosetta Stone for Spanish. Luke and Eden are using almost the exact same curriculum for most of their subjects and Adam is doing PreK worksheets and ABC Mouse for preschool. Meanwhile, I turned our basement into our classroom… it’s not complete, but it’s really nice to have an isolated spot from the rest of our house to do schoolwork.

I’m only a week in …. so…. I am nowhere close to making an assessment of how it’s going. Will I homeschool after 2020-2021?!? Who can really tell…. but the one thing I do know for certain is this is the commitment I have made to our family for the next 9 months.

Wine and prayers appreciated.

What path will your children take this school year? Was it a difficult decision for you to make?