Honey, we’re homeschooling the kids!

Why choose to homeschool our children?

My husband and I generally for the past five years have had differing views on whether or not to homeschool. It is something that has honestly been on my heart since I was pregnant with our first. For me, I knew five years would not be long enough to have him at home with me, and just as I knew it would, it’s flown by! One moment he was a newborn in my arms, the next he’s five and ready to start kindergarten.

My husband on the other hand has steadily been adamant about the kids attending public school. However, when we moved to Virginia for some reason the majority of friends I made were homeschooling their kids, and I thought there has to be something to this. Though homeschooling has been around since people have had children to teach, the movement has grown steadily since the pandemic really hit in 2020. His idea that “our kids will be weird if we homeschool them” couldn’t be further from the truth in today’s society.

My main “whys” behind wanting to homeschool our children…

Personalized education – I’ll be able to give my kids more one on one attention with their academics than if they were in a class of 20-30 students. I’m hoping that because of this they will retain more and perform well academically. They’ll also be able to cover subjects that they may not normally encounter in school and dive deeper into those they are really interested in.

Let our kids be little – By teaching them at home, we can get the same amount of education done in a much shorter time frame. This allows for tons of free time for independent play, outdoor activities, and fieldtrips. We are also of the opinion that kids now are being exposed to things way too mature for their young minds to comprehend at a young age from other kids at school or even the curriculum that’s being taught. We’d like to keep them little just a little longer.

Free up our schedule – By completing school work in a fraction of the time and during parts of the day when we have down time, we have the freedom to go on fieldtrips, sign up for activities that would normally be held during the school day, and plenty of time for free play. We also don’t need to worry about them missing school when we visit family in other states, because we will always be able to bring our work with us.

More family time – I love to be with my kids. Hence the reason we made the decision back in 2019 for me to leave my career and stay home with our baby (at the time) full time. Two more babies later, and I still feel the same way. I love watching his face light up when he understands a new math concept, or teaching him to read. It’s amazing to be the one to see all those milestones rather than putting them into someone else’s hands. They also love to be in the kitchen with me helping me prep veggies and cook meals and I like the idea of still having time to do those sorts of things with them.

Raise a lifelong learner – The end goal is to raise a kid who loves to learn and understands how to teach themselves, versus playing the game of school and memorizing facts just long enough to pass the test or get the grade.

So, we’re trying it

So through a lot of discussion and basically me pounding DH with information :)… we have decided to try homeschooling for a year and see how it goes. I don’t expect things to pan out perfectly the first year, after all I have three children five and under. I know there will be chaos, but I think we’ll come out the other side better than we were before, and prepared to tackle the next year.

We are currently using The Good and The Beautiful Kindergarten level math curriculum and we have loved it so far. It’s an open and go curriculum that is scripted so it makes things extremely easy for the parent. The illustrations are beautiful, and it comes with all the math manipulatives you need for the curriculum in a convenient box. I’ll definitely be posting frequent updates about curriculum choice, unit studies, and what we are up to in our homeschool journey as we go along this year. Wish us luck!