Why I Choose to Homeschool My Children

Home school or unschool your children, most people would shudder at the thought. I was forced to make that choice due to the school system's inability or unwillingness to deal with the violence in schools.

Should any child be subjected to the violence that runs rampant in the school system? Should a child be forced to work below their grade level due to extremely low school proficiency ratings?

We moved to Pennsylvania from South Carolina, thinking our children would be educated at a higher level, as I've always heard schools in the north were far superior to schools in the south. What a shock it was to learn that the school my children were to attend had an average proficiency rating of less than 48% in all subjects, and most as low as 36%!

I did enroll my children in the school we were forced into by the superintendent for 6 weeks. The horror stories my children told on a daily basis were enough for me to make the decision to home school them. As of last Monday I removed my children from school. I have decided on an eclectic mix of homeschooling/unschooling, using the Internet, the library, our historic surroundings and some traditional means of teaching.

As they were traumatized by the repeated acts of violence and complete and utter disobedience at school I allowed them a couple of days to "detox" from the school setting. On our third day, the children asked that I take them to the library! Delighted by their request we headed down to our local library, a leisurely walk on a glorious autumn day. We stopped along the way to read the plagues of historical significance. Both children thoroughly enjoyed walking through the historic town we live in and trying to guess how old the buildings were and to determine what period they were built in. Upon our arrival at the library, my daughter went straight to the computer to look up a series of books she had been reading when we left South Carolina. She wants to finish the entire series. My son, on the other hand, went straight for the books and picked one that was a little above his level but he insisted he wanted that book, as Broken Bones is something he wanted to know about. He also picked another book, relating to an issue we're having while restoring our 1893 Queen Anne, called Bats. Both of the children seemed very eager to get started with their reading.

Upon our arrival at home I began organizing my book marked pages for their studies. As I was going through all the wonderfully helpful websites I had found my son came in and saw I was on a site that had math quizzes on it. He just had to try it! An hour and a half later I pulled him off the computer long enough to show him some of the other pages I had found. By this time my daughter had come in to get help with the pronunciation of a word in her book and saw that I had found a website with geography quizzes on it. She had been studying geography when I pulled her from school and wanted to see how much she remembered. She sat down at the computer and identified the states, the capitals of the states and the continents. Delighted with her accuracy she asked if there were other things she could be quizzed on.

Their thirst for knowledge was astounding! I set up bookmarks for each of their respective grade levels and showed them how to access them at their leisure. Now I have a hard time getting them off the computer because they are so anxious to learn. These websites have wonderful information, printable worksheets, timed quizzes, games and puzzles geared toward education. Instead of pushing them to learn they seem to be pushing me to educate them.

Though we are still new to the homeschooling arena the children are excelling at every subject they undertake. My daughter asked that I find spelling words for her that were harder than the ones she was getting at school because they weren't challenging her enough. My son, not to be outdone by his older sister, asked that I make his words more difficult as well. At the end of the first week of homeschooling, the first three days actually, my children had learned more than in the prior six weeks of attending a traditional school setting.

Our lives have taken a dramatic change since we began the homeschooling process. The children help in making their breakfast, which doesn't always turn out very well, but that's part of their learning process as well. They are both very interested in learning their way around a kitchen, which excites me to no end! See, we get home economics in there much earlier than the school system. We do our physical education through walking, bicycling, roller blading or just playing in the backyard as a family. The children are currently studying anatomy, the skeletal structure in particular, so there's our biology/science. We study history/social studies by actually going to the places it happened. Luckily we live in a very historic area so it's not a difficult journey. The children pick out one word a day to learn the spelling and definition of as well as how to appropriately use it in a sentence. We have 20 weekly spelling words, ten of which are vocabulary as well. They practice their math with worksheets and online, as well as in our daily activities, like working with a budget at the grocery store. We are currently learning Spanish together, a phrase a day. The children are learning through living every day.

There are so many things we need to know as adults that school does not teach us. I've always heard people refer to being "book smart" or "street smart". My children will be both. They will know how to balance a check book before most children understand the concept of a bank account. They will be able to budget for groceries and bills as that is an adult responsibility that is required knowledge. They will be given the freedom to learn things of interest in addition to required curriculum. They will be taught, unlike the children in the school system here, how to be a kind, caring individual. They will also learn the harshness of the real world, our troubled times and the horrors against humanity. They will be guided toward becoming a complete person, with both book sense and common sense.

I will continue writing of our endeavors as a homeschooling family, I do hope you will return to check our progress. You will be amazed at how much more advanced home schoolers are than traditional school children. I will be posting their testing results and end of the school year evaluation data for all to review.