A Joyful Homeschool
With a title like this, you may mistakenly think that our Homeschool is perfect! Let me tell you – it is not! LOL! But, we do have a lot of joy in the way we Homeschool. Joy doesn’t necessarily mean fun. It means that we try to make learning a process that we enjoy and therefore are always adding new ideas to the way we school.
I gave up trying to duplicate school at home many years ago! Maybe you also were like me, and tried to set up a little school room with a small desk and chairs, blackboard, charts on walls and things like that. I even used the same books that Daniel was using at school that his teacher kindly gave me! As I look back, it did help me to ease into Homeschooling. There were so many curriculum choices, it made my head spin. I had a wonderful experienced Homeschooling friend who encouraged me to keep things SIMPLE! The words of wisdom she shared have stayed with me all these years. I thank God for experienced Homeshool women who share their lives with us!
As time went on and I got to know my children better (which is one of the greatest benefits of Homeschooling!), I also started to recognize the different ways in which they learned best. I began to lean more towards a classical, Charlotte Mason, unschooling style of learning! In other words, I took “good” things from different styles of learning and combined them to make our own philosophy of education. For example, my children actually enjoyed doing workbooks! But that didn’t fit into the traditional idea of unschooling, now did it?! So I worried that I couldn’t use workbooks. Did Charlotte Mason use workbooks? Well, she used copywork and narration. But they liked workbooks!!!! It took a while, but eventually I let go of having to do things “exactly” how a certain person or company expected me to teach my children. It was ok to combine things! It was ok to do some workbooks, some copywork, some narration. It was ok to combine worksheets with making original notebook pages for our notebooks. It was ok to make up my own curriculum!
After coming to this conclusion I felt an incredible sense of relief and peace. God had given my children to me because I was the one who could give them a tailor-made education. No school teacher, no matter how well educated they were or how much they loved children, could do this. You too are the best one to educate your children! God gave them to you – not someone else! You are their best teacher!
As I develop this website, I want to put up things that I have used in educating my children. I’d like to share them in case they will be of use to you. It is also a way for me to record our own homeschooling journey!
I think the greatest joy in homeschooling is that we are spending time with eachother. People ask me how I can cope with spending all my time with my children, and don’t I need a break sometimes? I reply and say that as amazing as it may seem, I ENJOY my children! I enjoy spending TIME with my children! There is a difference between LOVING my children and ENJOYING them. There is a difference between doing homeschooling and enjoying homeschooling. There is a difference between homeschooling and having a joyful homeschool. My prayer for you is that you too will enjoy homeschooling and be able to say that your homeschool is indeed a joyful one.