What started our homeschool journey?

Ask any homeschool parent what prompted them to begin investigating homeschooling and you will, no doubt, hear a unique story. Our reasons can be as varied as our taste in food and clothing, or our family backgrounds.

Our family's home school journey began in 1990. After teaching the middle of our three sons to read as a preschooler, we attended the local public school's Kindergarten orientation and realized very quickly that he would not be sufficiently challenged in their course of study. I had several friends who home schooled and encouraged me to consider it, so we decided to bring our oldest son home from public school and begin home schooling with a 3rd grader, a Kindergartener and a baby.

Of course, we started off with traditional textbooks because that was what I knew from my school experience. We managed through our first years this way, but frankly, it got boring...and quite challenging for me to cover all subjects for so many different grade levels. Eventually, I decided to leave the textbooks for a more hands-on learning approach and joined 4 families in a co-op using unit-based materials. Learning in this way was much more exciting, but it was not uncommon for me to spend at least 3 hours each weekend preparing for our lessons.

As our oldest son approached high school, I began looking for a method that would provide for this level of study, help me break away from a pile of textbooks for each child, and release me from extensive preparation time. I found my answer in Sonlight Curriculum. The Instructor's Guides minimize the need for preparation, we enjoyed reading much of our materials as a family, and instead of a pile of textbooks written for a captive audience, we enjoyed a collection of books that immersed our family in the environment and lives of the people who made history. Just months into our first year using Sonlight Curriculum, my children voted unanimously that it was the most fun they had had in school.

Now our oldest son has graduated from college, married and is starting a family, while the middle son is in college, and the youngest is finishing high school. For those of you who think that high school is simply too big an undertaking for the home environment, I would encourage you to reconsider. While we would all agree that it is best for parents to be home with preschoolers, I personally feel that our teenagers need us just as much. By home schooling in the high school years, you can help to shape your child's studies to prepare him for his future and provide stable support and guidance as your teen tests his or her wings.

You don't have to have the end figured out when you first start ... trust me, I certainly did not! In the beginning it was a one year at a time commitment. And then one day I realized that home school was a part of our lives, something I no longer needed to debate each summer. It has benefitted us as a family and as individuals, and enabled us to touch many lives in ways that we never would have had we followed the "norm" of shunting our children off to traditional school.