Face masks, boys in girl’s bathrooms, same-sex education, forced vaccines, are you ready to homeschool yet?!
Regardless of whether or not you agree with the aforementioned list of challenges currently in schools, I bet we can agree that you want the CHOICE to decide what your kids are being taught and if they are to be followed by the opposite sex as they go into the bathroom or not.
Even if you’re doing public or private school remotely, you still have very little say in what your child is learning, how much time they have to spend on it or in what style it is being taught.
Despite this list of woes, homeschooling can be daunting and overwhelming to many who have never considered it before. So let’s ask some questions and get some answers for you!
Why should you homeschool?
To answer that question, we must ask another question; what is your goal with your child’s learning?
Are you trying to raise a child who knows everything? A child who is smarter than all his peers? Or perhaps a child that is at least average among her friends?
Or are you trying to raise a child who LOVES TO LEARN, who thrives in life, who wakes up eager to know more, who cannot wait to tell his friends about the knowledge he gained?!
Hmmm…there’s a lot to consider here, right?
Are you smarter than a 5th grader?
If you’ve ever seen an episode of “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth-Grader” you will quickly realize that you simply don’t learn things in volume. On the show they feature college graduates, professors and normal people all trying to ace the test and NONE of them do well in answering questions from the 5th grade! Why? Because we all have a learning style and anything presented outside of that style eludes us, no matter how smart we are.
For this reason, we’ve made our goal simple: Raise kids who LOVE to LEARN!
Here’s what we’ve found that works.
- The goal of Homeschooling is not to cram as much knowledge into your child’s head at the fastest rate possible, but instead to expose them to as many (healthy) things as possible and peak their interest, while inspiring them to LOVE LEARNING.
The exploratory stage
When kids are young, you simply cannot stop them from exploring their world. They crawl around putting everything in their mouths, picking things up and wanting to go anywhere they haven’t gone before (or any place they’re not allowed to go…haha).
As they get older they ask a million questions (two million for some…lol) and always want to know more. It’s at that time in life that we as parents get tired and lazy. We start saying things like “Stop asking questions” and “I don’t know, stop asking me” and worst of all “just go play on your screens”. We replace their intuitive nature with a sedentary, lazy one that says “just feed me screens, I don’t want to move…”.
This is the stage where we start to snuff out their exploratory nature and kill their natural curiosity.
Unfortunately, it’s a downhill slope of devastating blows to their natural way of learning after that.
- We put them in a classroom with 20-30+ other kids who all have different learning style.
- Force them to sit down for hours at a time and learn everything one way.
- Force-feed them information on subjects they are not interested in and test them constantly.
- We throw them into a social web of peer pressure, hormonal imbalances and sexual exploration in hopes that they will “focus on their studies”.
And then we expect them to “do well in school”. This is LUDICROUS! This is not how kids LEARN!! 😡
Here’s my goal of homeschooling:
- To enhance my child’s life through natural learning.
- To share information with my children in a way that THEY learn best (more on that in the next blog!)
- To instill a LOVE of LEARNING in them that causes them to ask MORE questions!
- And finally, to introduce them to things they’ve never seen or heard of before in a way that intrigues them and makes them want to learn more!
Let me also point out that homeschooling is not the easy route. Yes, it will take time on your part. It take research, resources, and a whole lot of TIME spent with your kids, but it is MUCH easier than you think if you take the right steps with the right goal in mind (more on that in the next blog!)
Coming up!
I am going to share all of the secrets Michelle and I have learned in our 12 years of homeschooling (and my experience being homeschooled through high school) in the next few blogs so be sure to sign up and get notified when the next one comes out!
You can also check out our youtube series on this topic as well here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFVz_0TnExKq2yW_eqtE-EjEgGZWzfmuY
I hope this helps you as you consider homeschooling. I really believe that there has never been a better time in history to take control of your child’s future and help them grow into a wonderful, successful adult!
Let’s take this journey together!
