Looking Back

Today’s Prompt:

Looking Back Sunday, March 30
Share your personal history…before you were a home educator. What was life like? Think about things you miss and things you and your family have gained.

Who was I before I began homeschooling? It’s not so very different. I was a SAHM whose kids were in public school.

For two years I volunteered on field trips and helped out in the school library. I was also an adult literacy volunteer, and a Girl Guide leader. In our last year of really trying to work with the school, I helped out with our variant of the PTA. I did the bake sales and the raffles, and I escaped every couple of weeks to meet a girlfriend for breakfast and plan the girls’ activities and crafts for upcoming meetings.

What’s changed is that my girls are home with me all the time now – well, pretty much all the time! We’re much less stressed than we were before. They used to be so rushed – up at 6 am and not home until after 3 pm on an early day. With after school programs, homework, dance & Ju-Jutsu we were running all the time. I detested homework time, and I’m sure Dojogirl did too. Half the time I felt the work was inappropriate – too easy or too hard for her. At least a quarter of the time I couldn’t help her because she couldn’t remember what she was supposed to do, and the instructions were either contradictory or nonexistent.

These days the girls understand that we’re “doing school” all the time, and there’s no homework at 5 pm while we’re trying to get supper on the table & rush out for a class. They practice things when we’re shopping or baking, or they learn new concepts watching television and talking with Daddy. We’re so much more relaxed, and the learning comes more easily. My three year old mas almost mastered the Greek alphabet. My seven year old is keeping up with fourth grade grammar. My ten year old is finally beginning to know (not count) her math facts, and is really making sense of fractions. We couldn’t get her to read a chapter book this time last year, but now she’s almost never without a book and reading the long versions of Grimm’s Fairy Tales to her siblings at bed time!

What do I miss? That “alone” time. I have three girls home with me all the time. There’s no time to nip out to the grocery store or go off to buy Easter treats when they’re “at school.” There’s certainly no time to be alone with hubby or to go back to bed when I’m feeling under the weather. That part was rough in the first few months. I think we’ve come to a place where we can cope with it, now. I do fewer things outside the house unless they are family activities. Hubby has taken some time off Ju-Jutsu, and I’m enjoying the “almost-alone” time with him.

Last night we marked Earth Hour by turning off all the lights at 8pm. Last year that would have been something we’d like to have done, but probably couldn’t squeeze in with everything else we had going. This year it wasn’t just something we did, it was a learning experience on several levels. The girls are really paying attention to the world around them now, and beginning to put that great puzzle that is life together. Maybe they’re just getting older, but I’d like to think at least part of it is because they aren’t being told what to think anymore, but how to think for themselves.

This post is part of a series in honour of Home Education Week. Please visit Principled Discovery for more reading.

This work was created by Ruby of Freehold 2, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada License.

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