In 2011 my husband and I married. Two months into our marriage we discovered we were pregnant (YAY a honeymoon baby!) At the time I was imagining sending our 4 future darling children (two boys and two girls, of course) to public school, but my husband had other thoughts on the matter. While we agreed on the number of children to have, we disagreed on how they should be educated; his preference was homeschool, I was terrified by the concept! By the time our baby girl was about to arrive, he and I believed I could homeschool our future children. Fast forward 3 ½ years and it was time to preschool our daughter, to whom I’ll refer to as Little Miss. At that same time I became pregnant with Little Mister (our son), this time; however, it was a very rough pregnancy and I was unable to keep up with teaching preschool at home. We read books, played games, and sang lots of songs, and I thought we've got this I am doing enough. Well 3 months before she turned 5, my husband and I were both quite certain I would be unable to adequately homeschool our daughter after the preschool-pregnancy fiasco, plus now we had a brand new very demanding baby, how would I be able to juggle him and successfully school our daughter? So, we investigated other options and, after much prayer and consideration we discovered a private school that we just fell in love with. It was everything we had wanted for our daughter, or so we thought. I had no idea they would send so much homework home, sometimes a couple of hours’ worth, for half-day kindergarten. My daughter couldn't keep up with it, and because she did not have formal preschool she was now behind, according to them. About 2/3 of the way through the school year they were asking us to consider tutoring. Tutoring?! For kindergarten, I thought?! Aren't they supposed to be playing with play-dough, eating paste, learning their colors, numbers, and letters?! Evidently, they expected them to graduate kindergarten reading with ease, know addition, subtractions, count by 2's, 5's, 10's, tell time, how to count money, and write full sentences with correct spelling and punctuation. This just reinforced my feelings of failure from our home preschool stint even more. Every night we spent on homework she would sob and sob, it was creating conflict in what used to be a loving and nurturing home environment. We were all stressed out. During school she was at a desk for a large portion of her 3 hours there, with the exception of 15 minutes for recess, a short time for circle time, and centers. They did not have art, science, or library for half day students, only the three R's, which they used worksheets to teach. Now I love a good worksheet, but when your 5-year-old is doing at least 4+ a day with very few breaks, and then brings home more worksheets for homework each week, it's a bit much. The private school was the right atmosphere, her teacher was wonderful and loving, it was just not the right learning environment for a very hands-on, bouncy (think Tigger) sensitive learner that our daughter is.
Little miss struggled to focus at school, she is also extremely slow with writing and has difficulty finishing her work on time, all of which caused her to fall behind in class. After taking those things into consideration and the fact that she had no actual hands on learning experience each day; my hubby and I had several long discussions and lots of time in prayer, we finally arrived again on choosing to homeschool. Little Miss and I are now halfway through our first year of home learning and she is thriving! For us home school was the right decision, we just needed to trust God. Without the private school fiasco, I never would have discovered the right home learning style for our family, but that is for another post… Stay tuned for more from Love in a Little House!
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