This post is part of a narrative history of our homeschool. It is about why we chose to homeschool, what we did and how we did it. It is about our failures and frustrations as well as our successes. The plan is to make an honest accounting of it all for the benefit of ourselves and others. This is a work in progress which was started in late October 2014 after the kids had already skipped most or all of high school, Christian had earned a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics (Summa Cum Laude), Kelly had earned a Bachelors degree in Statistics (Magna Cum Laude) and they were ensconced in funded PhD programs on the West Coast. I add to the narrative as I have time.
Homeschool was not even on our radar when Kelly was at an age to start kindergarten. We lived in a fairly poor government school district just a couple of blocks from a low performing elementary school in a suburb of Portland, Oregon so we were not too excited about putting Kelly there. We looked around and found a high performing Christian elementary school about a mile away. We interviewed the teachers there and decided to give it a try. Kelly enjoyed herself and had quite a good year there, socially. The next post in this section of Our Homeschool Story series describes our experience at this traditional Christian school.
Toward the end of Kelly’s kindergarten year, a group home for juvenile delinquents moved into the house next to us so we decided to move. We sold our house and bought another one in a more affluent suburb with much better schools, still in Portland. We could not afford to put Kelly into any of the private schools in the area, so we considered putting her into the local government elementary school. We wanted to investigate other options because Kelly had not learned anything in her experience in a traditional kindergarten. We found that, in Oregon, a parent has the right to postpone putting them into school until they are seven years old. We decided we would take that year to push Kelly further ahead by homeschooling her.
The third post in this section of the series describes my first foray into learning how to homeschool. I took a fairly typical path reading The Well Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home by Susan Wise Bauer and Jessie Wise. I talked to lots of friends, figured out the laws, identified curricula and did all the stuff I thought might prepare me to teach the kids at home. The fourth post in this series describes what we did, how we did it and how we thought. Without this first pass at homeschooling, I do not think I would have had the will nor knowledge to make what I believe were the great (for us) choices we mad in our second pass at homeschooling several years later.
Betty Blonde #203 – 04/27/2009
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