Thinking about Homeschooling...

I am starting this blog as a beginning of a journey into home schooling. I want somewhere where I can refer back to my daughter’s development and progressions, also as a place I can have feedback hopefully in the future from followers, who may be my mother, friends, or other home school families I meet along the way.

My daughter’s name is Emilie and currently she is 17 months and 6 days old :-P

I have only recently considered home schooling, probably because my husband and I just assumed that a public school is just “the thing you do” when your children reach school age.

I would like to, for my first blog post, write down some of my initial reasons for thinking about schooling at home.

Number  1. I love my daughter! Well this is an obvious one, not just the fact that I would love to spend every waking hour with her (oh, please let the waking hours be during daylight!!!) but that I also love watching her learn, showing her things that are old and boring to me, but delightfully new to her. Even at only 1½ years, she has taught herself so many things that I am amazed at how clever she is! Life and learning is for sure a real miracle! I would love to be able to be the one to guide her in her lifetime of learning, to be there to celebrate each achievement and to comfort and encourage at each pitfall.

Number  2.  I am scarred. Yes, scarred. The school system has ruined my desire for learning. One of my first memories as a child was of my mother, a teacher, tutoring school aged children when I was only about 2. I remember them learning to read using a cardboard stand, with word tabs that were slipped into pockets along the stand to make sentences. I REALLY wanted to be like those big kids and be able to read like that, so my mum showed me. I picked it up really quickly because I WANTED to learn it. My mother was a great teacher. She taught me so much in my years before school, and allowed me to explore and discover things for myself too.

Then I started year one. My teacher was heavily pregnant, grouchy and just downright awful! Not only did she squash any pride I had in what I was already able to do, she squashed my desire to learn on top of what I already knew how to do. She was not my last experience in this. I’m sorry to say that most of my school years were unhappy. I was angry at my mum for telling me that I was smart, when WHAT DID SHE KNOW??? Obviously I’m dumb because look! I can’t do anything right, I hate learning!

I do not want my daughter to end up in the same cycle of hating to learn. I want her to be able to discover life, to love learning, to share learning with me, my husband and any siblings that may come along after her! I want to get her off to the best start and to tailor her education to suit her ability and her pace. To slow down or speed up when she needs it, not when the classroom teacher says so.

Number 3. I can already see what the school system is doing to my step-daughter, Madison. Before she went to school she was a bright, bubbly child who loved to play “schools” with me and learn because she wanted to learn. I taught her the basics of reading and her proudest achievement was being able to count in “twos” – Two Four Six Eight Ten Twelve!! She is ten now, year 5, and she is lagging behind greatly. My greatest annoyance is that her teachers have never done anything to try and help her catch up, or understand something that is baffling her. I don’t want this for Emilie.

Now, I have a plan in my head that at the moment probably doesn’t match the plan in my husband’s head! My husband, Paul, and I have discussed our future. We are in the process of extending our house (which means a bigger mortgage :-/) which should be finished by Christmas time 2011 (Emilie’s second birthday) and we want to start trying to conceive our next child in July 2011, meaning that if we fall pregnant in that month we will have an April 2012 baby, or more than likely, we will have a baby later in the year of 2012 or even 2013 if we are unsuccessful for awhile.

Our plan we discussed was to have our two children fairly close, and as Paul is on good money working fly in fly out on the mines in Christmas Creek, Western Australia, I would be a stay at home mum until the children reach school age, at which time I would return to work either part or fulltime and have Paul come back to work in Perth again.

Now, I cannot say what will happen in our future. One day I will look back on this first blog post and think, wow, things really didn’t go the way we saw it!! But I have a plan hatching in my head (which hasn’t reached Paul’s head via my mouth yet LOL) to see how things go with homeschooling Emilie for her first few years while I would still be home with her younger sibling. Ideally, if I were to have a baby after July 2012, then their “school years” will have a larger gap (3 years instead of 2) so Emilie could be homeschooled for longer if it so happened that our situation meant that the kids were forced to go to conventional school in the end.

I have made a few comments about homeschooling to Paul just in passing conversation!! His reaction hasn’t been negative, so that is a start. I don’t want to jump in and say “I’m going to home school the kids!!!” That is likely to scare him. He will think, “I’m doomed to work the mines forever!!!” And to be honest, that’s not what I want for him either. I hate the fact that he is away from Madison and Emilie, and if we were millionaires (ooh that would be nice!) then we could all be together and he could even be involved in the homeschooling environment. On his two week break when he is at home, he will be able to see how well homeschooling Emilie is going (he has already complimented me on how well I am doing as a mother to Emilie) and possibly that may convince him that homeschooling isn’t just some backward, hippy-style, commune-ish, cult that weirdo parents do because they are paranoid of the government or teachers in general!

So my plan for now is to just go with Emilie’s pace at her age of 17 months. In my next blog post I would like to describe Emilie and her capabilities at her current age, and a few ideas I have tried, or ideas I would like to try. I’m going to go with what my mother describes as EPIC – Explore, Ponder, Investigate, Celebrate. See her website www.educationathome.com.au Emilie has plenty of time until she is what is deemed as “school age” but there is no reason why I cannot start the learning process today! She is a bright girl and all I want is to nurture her desire for learning and to see that passion be sustained into her future instead of getting squashed as mine did.