Taking the Next Step

Beginning our homeschooling journey

On Monday my family officially begins our homeschooling journey. This feels monumental and earth-shifting in some ways, but in other ways it seems like just another small step along the path.

We have an advantage in this adventure that our parents didn’t have. Both my husband and I were homeschooled for all of our school until college. We already know what homeschooling looks like from the inside. We already know a bunch of curriculum options and what we think of them. We already know the joys and the challenges that frequently come with the deal. We’ve had all our lives to get used to other people thinking it’s weird. We already know that despite what anyone may say, it’s perfectly possible to become a happy, healthy, social adult without the traditional school in our history.

We have another advantage too, in that homeschooling is much more prevalent now than it was when either of our parents began. The options available to homeschooling parents are now overflowing. There are co-ops, online classes, curriculum options, book lists, and experienced families a plenty. More, in fact, than you could ever exhaust. The leap is, I think, becoming easier to take, and that’s a good thing.

However, it does remain a significant and rather daunting thing to start out on this journey of home education. It begins, of course, as soon as you become parents, as a parent is teaching his child every day by his words and actions. But the start of formal schooling is the next big step, and it will change the pace of our lives for many, many years to come. Schedules, book lists, memory work, math facts, pencils and notebooks, letters and numbers will come onto the stage and take more and more of our time as the years pass. It’s exciting and nerve-wracking all at once. We consciously chose to wait to begin formal schooling until age 6, in part to ensure that the rigors of academic discipline didn’t encroach on the need of young children for playtime. Even now, as we begin our first year, we will likely only spend a few hours in school work a day. This is one of the great “secrets” (but not really secret) of homeschooling: it takes much less time to teach one child than to teach a whole classroom. We will still have much of our day free and plenty of time to run and dance and play.

While I’ve been through homeschooling before, I’ve never gone through it from the parent’s role, and so there’s much I still don’t know. It is a big responsibility to be the one directing and choosing your child’s education, and yet the challenge is invigorating. It is, dare I say, fun to choose the books we will read, pick out notebooks at the store, and write out an outline for our day. We will be focusing on reading books and narrating them instead of using much for curriculum, and that is exciting to me too. Reading is one of my favorite hobbies, and school feels a lot less daunting when most of it consists of reading good books. Of course there will be math and nature studies and learning to read and write as well, and there will be good days and bad days, but on the whole we are looking forward to this new adventure.

For those of you with an interest in what specifically we will be doing on this year in school, here’s a few more details:

We are using Ambleside Online as a rough outline and guide. We will be reading Aesop’s Fables, Fairy Tales, Just So Stories, and Edith Nesbit’s Shakespeare retellings. We will be reading through some of my favorite children’s poetry collections: Stevenson’s Child’s Garden of Verses and Milne’s When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six (all of which are a delight). We will be doing Nature Studies following this book. We will learn about three artists and three composers over the course of the year, memorize hymns and songs, bible verses and poetry. We will work on learning German and learning Geography, learning to read and learning to write. We will be trying out Wittenberg Academy’s Math curriculum. And we will be learning ancient history, focusing especially on Ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome (this differs the most from Ambleside Online, but I think I will much prefer doing a 4 year history cycle, which will be easier to juggle with multiple children). In this first year, we will be focusing on the art of narration to help build attention, and memory with our readings. Our book list is long, but Gwen already loves reading, and I do not see her having any trouble sitting and listening to the selection of books we have, especially as I intend to keep lessons restricted to only a few hours. I am excited to see how all our grand plans play out in reality.