The Urban Permaculture Farm Magazine

When we found out that I was pregnant with our son, my husband and I lived in a school district that was known not for its prestigious awards and accomplishments, but for its bumbling mistakes and embarrassingly low graduation rates. We knew immediately that we would not be sending him to the public schools if we hadn't moved by the time he was five, but we weren't sure what we *would* be doing. We didn't give it much thought until well after he was born.

Two years later, Junior was amazing us daily with his ability to understand learn and mimic. We thought we had a genius on our hands, but what parent doesn't? We started thinking about the options we thought we had-Catholic school and private school. We hadn't really "heard" of homeschooling yet-it was mostly in one ear and out the other when we heard the word. One day while speaking with my mom, she mentioned that she had considered homeschooling my sister and I when we were young, but had allowed her family to talk her out of it. Looking bad, she wished she had at least given it a shot, since the public school system hadn't done wonders for Sis and me. I got to thinking about it and I hit the internet that evening.

WOW was all I could say! There was SO much information out there; I didn't even know where to start reading about it, much less doing it! I read as much as I could, soaking up testimonials, studies, analyses, message board posts-everything. I started talking to Hubby about it daily, quoting this and that at him, and overloading him with information. He basically told me to back off, since he couldn't even think straight with so much at once (what can I say, I tend to hyperfocus J )!

We temporarily dropped the topic when we transferred to Florida for work right after Junior turned three. We were there for two and half years, enough time for Junior to be in daycare for the very first time (another bad experience, story at eleven) and for him to enroll in *gasp* Public School. Unfortunately, Hubby and I were both working full time and needed to remain that way, so we didn't have the option of homeschooling. I had "worked on" Hubby since discovering homeschooling and he was s-l-o-w-l-y coming around to it, especially when he saw Junior reading at four-all from what I was doing in the evenings with him.

Junior's Kindergarten teacher was wonderful-thank you God-so he did as well as I could expect. He was actually pretty bored, since Teacher said he didn't leave Kindergarten knowing anything more than what he knew going in-he was already at a first grade level. She cried when we pulled him at the end of February to move home to Ohio because she was losing her best test scores in Junior and had just received a new student who only knew the letter "X" and the number "3".

Since we were moving near the end of the school year and because Ohio's compulsory attendance age is six, we decided that we would "try on" homeschooling that March through that August and see what we thought before we decided whether or not to enroll Junior in public school. I only needed to work two days per week at that point due to Hubby's better job, so it worked out perfectly.

The rest is history J we love it so much that we wouldn't think of doing it any other way, even if I had to back to work full time. There are a number of things that we really see as being the BIG reasons that we, as a family, love homeschooling. First, we live on OUR schedule, not the schedule of some random, make-it-all-fit, stressed out administrator. Hubby works third shift now (as do I, on my two days), so this is a biggie for him. Junior and I are NOT, I repeat, NOT morning people, so this works out so well for us I can't even tell ya. Next, we can progress in each individual subject at the rate that is best for Junior, not the rest of his class. He excels in reading dramatically, so he's reading the same books that the fifth grader next door reads. He can stand in front of our family picture collage on the living room wall, knowing the age of one person in each picture and figure out the rest.

*I* can't even do that without some serious brain crunching. He can follow a recipe by himself, figuring out doubling or halving as he goes. He's very uncoordinated, however, so the simple P.E. stuff is more his speed. His handwriting is a lot like his daddy's, too-almost scribbles-so getting him to write is an exercise in extreme patience, and even then it's iffy. Finally, our third main reason that locks us into homeschooling forever is that he's not learning how to gun someone down at school, how to most efficiently get through the metal detector lines, or how to get through life doing the bare minimum, which is the philosophy most schools teach these days, however subconscious it is.

If you haven't made the decision yet to homeschool your child(ren), please note: The style, the curriculum or where you fall on the school-at-home (classic) to no-structure-at-all (unschooling) spectrum is not the most important part of your decision. Homeschooling is about you and your children doing what is best for your family. Some families even go back and forth, doing public school some years and homeschooling other years, depending how the needs of the family. And that is the best part of homeschooling-the freedom to do what is best for you and yours.