Making the shift to homeschool

My first experience in homeschooling came when my oldest son was in third grade.  He attended public school and had a class of about 24 students.  I remember this year vividly because the school year started roughly.  They didn’t have a teacher assigned at first.  Finally, when the teacher was assigned the instruction method was not suitable for my son. This became evident in his lack of progress for which teachers thought he should be tested for a disability.

The teachers found that my son was likely suffering from Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and needed a second opinion from a medical professional.  We sought the advice of a medical professional who asked us a few questions and then said that they could give him a prescription that would help him. We ultimately decided against going the medication route and wanted to more fully investigate his learning experience in the classroom.

Our findings

We found that the third graders in his class were mostly subjected to learning via the overhead projector. Yes, an overhead! This was 16 years ago! Everyone was expected to learn the same thing at the same time.  If you needed more time to learn, you had to give up your recess.  Additionally, if you couldn’t grasp the concepts in the same amount of time as the others, you wouldn’t get to participate in extra-curricular activities. This made school very challenging for him. Not to mention, kind of dull and punitive. 

The decision

With that discovery, we decided to withdraw our son from public school and homeschool him. 

Although homeschooling was not a popular choice in our community at the time, we followed the process to make it official as outlined by our state and jumped right in.  We didn’t have all the bells and whistles to get started but we knew that we wanted a better learning experience for him so we learned together!

Now we are facing similar but different circumstances with my younger children who are middle school-aged and in public school.  Although we never really stopped homeschooling, we didn’t do it in a traditional way.  That is why I am starting this blog.  I want to uncover all the dynamic ways families are educating their kids.  I hope we can learn together as I renew the homeschooling journey with my middle schoolers.