Why I Decided to Homeschool

In my second episode of this first season, I will tell you why I decided to homeschool! I will also be sharing some personal details about my family. 

Amazon Big Kindergarten Workbook
School Zone Big Kindergarten Workbook: 320 pages

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Transcript

Welcome to Homeschool Horizons!

I’m Yvette, your host, and in today’s episode I will be sharing why I decided to homeschool! To do that, I am going back to the beginning of our story. 

First off, let me tell you that I never thought I would be a homeschool mom! I never even wanted to be a teacher when I was a little girl. So I definitely did not think about homeschooling my then 3 yr old son. My intention was to put him in a little preschool that was next door to the elementary school where my husband was actually a teacher. My husband is a public school teacher and has taught grades 4-6 for the past 29 years. 

I will be telling you all about that in a future episode. 

So as I was saying, our plan was to transition our son right into kindergarten from that little preschool. We thought it would be a good idea for him to be at the same school where my husband was at because my son had already been through so much in his little life that we felt he would feel safe knowing his dad was there. 

This next part, I hadn’t really planned on sharing what I’m about to share, but the more I thought about it, I decided it’s intertwined with my decision to homeschool. 

What I want to share is that we are an adoptive family. My son entered our lives at 6 days old through the foster care system. For the first 3 years of his life, we had supervised and unsupervised visits with his birth mom. This was very hard on him.  Once we were able to finally adopt him, I became extremely over protective of him.

I didn’t really even want to put him in any preschool because I didn’t want anything bad to happen to him or anyone to hurt him, but it seemed that with this particular preschool, it would be the easiest and safest way to begin his schooling.

He was in that preschool for about 2 months. One day, when I went to pick him up, the teacher wanted to talk to me. She told me that earlier that day the children had been working on their art projects and that 2 little boys were laughing at my son’s drawing and calling him a monster. 

Then during snack and playtime they kept calling my son a monster and my son began crying and that he had been very emotional all day because of that incident. I asked why they hadn’t called me and she  said that eventually they were able to calm him down and an aide stayed with him until I arrived. I was so upset. I had spent the last 3 years unable to do anything about anything that happened to my son when I couldn’t be there. I couldn’t allow for my son to have to suffer at all anymore now that it was in my hands. That was my sons last day there. 

But even at that point, I wasn’t thinking that I would homeschool him. I decided to try one more preschool that was super close to our home because the first one hadn’t been. I thought since it was closer, I could randomly pop in and check on him. Our experience at that preschool was fine. Not great, but not terrible. I just kept feeling like this wasn’t the right environment for him. I felt that he needed more individual attention and time to build up his sense of security and confidence. We decided to put him in Tae Kwon Do, but that wasn’t a good fit either, so eventually we took him out of that. I then decided to purchase a preschool workbook and began using it to teach him his alphabets, numbers, etc. He enjoyed learning that way and eventually when it was time to put him in kindergarten, we decided that he still wasn’t ready emotionally, so I bought a kindergarten workbook and several reading books and continued teaching him that way. And even though I was using the workbooks, I didn’t see myself as a homeschool mom yet.  I then decided to ask my younger sister for some advice as to how to homeschool because she had been homeschooling her daughter for a while. I had never actually talked to her about homeschooling. It wasn’t even on my radar all those years. My sister sent me a link to a homeschooling conference. My husband and I went and we met our first homeschool teacher there. We signed up with her charter and that was how we officially got started. It was literally at that point that I decided I would homeschool my son through kindergarten. I didn’t know about 1st grade.

 All I knew, was that I was now with a charter and that I had definitely made the decision to homeschool for this year. I say that because sometimes that’s exactly how it goes. You can take it year by year. You can even get started just like I did. If you don’t know anything about charters, don’t worry I will be talking about that in a future episode. 

So there you have it. That is why I decided to homeschool in a nutshell.  I hope this helps you in some way and I hope you decide to tune into future Homeschool Horizons episodes. I’ll be publishing new episodes weekly. Talk to you soon!