February 13, 2014 Homeschooling Tale

Today we will be catching up on school work.  Like a whole week's worth.

Homeschooling is great.  It gives our family a certain amount of freedom we would not have otherwise.  There's also a certain amount of constraints.  Like your kid is always there.

I love not having to wake up early and nagging at the kid to get up and get dressed.  Then there's either putting the  kid on the bus or driving her to school.  I'd think I'd rather claw my eyes out than drive to school 5 days a week.  We actually tried the bus for 3 years.  In Rowan's fourth year on the bus we started having issues about bullying.  If Rowan decided to go back to public school I would drive her.  I don't believe making someone self-immerse for an extended period of time in miserable situations makes them tougher.

Jace says he never wants her to go back to public school.  He says the influences there are too damaging.  Rowan does not like to watch any scary movie and we don't let her watch things with a lot of smooching or cussing.  So for her to go to a public school and be bombarded by violence, cliques, and behaviors of modern relationships makes her a little cuckoo.  And yes, these things do happen in first grade.

We're now into our second full year of homeschool.  It's been mostly great.  I can't remember being scared at all to try it.  Perhaps since I always pretended to be a teacher when I was little and taught my dolls prepared me for this.  While there are things I loathe teaching, like grammar, there are other things I love, like math.

Since we are in the country we do not belong to a homeschool group.  We did try but it wasn't a good fit and was pretty far away.  There are other kids in our neighborhood Rowan likes to play with.  She knows to get her work done by the time they are getting home from school, if she wants to play outside with them.

The truth is I like having her around.  She's becoming a real gardening nut and all around outside kind of girl.  She knows where food comes from.  She's becoming more capable with helping and she never complains about having to let the chickens out, or putting the chickens up at night.

I remember her favorite show as a baby was Little House On The Prairie.  She loves the books, too.  Perhaps as my love of teaching my dolls has come to fruition, so has her love of being Laura Ingalls Wilder.

For today we will have to put our outside dreams aside.  We will have to do our school work.