How I Got Here, Part 3

When Elena and Chloe were still preschoolers, my plan was to work part-time while they attended private school. But God changed my heart. He taught me that children truly are a blessing and motherhood is a valuable ministry. I realized that I couldn’t truly disciple my children if they were under the influence of others the majority of their day.

The questions for me then were: What and how am I going to teach them?

At the first homeschool bookfair I attended, I was completely overwhelmed by the number of choices of curricula available. Why do so many people think that a teacher must know everything in order to teach it to someone else? Have they forgotten that their teachers used answer keys to grade their papers? At the private school I attended, I learned almost no fine arts. I could not have explained how Picasso and Van Gogh were different. But with my handy dandy library card, I can teach my kids all about van Gogh’s blue and rose periods and Picasso’s cubism. With the MathUSee dvds, I can teach basic algebra to my 2^nd grader. With any number of phonics books, I can follow the scripts and teach my children to be successful readers.

I love that I am learning right along with my kids. All through school, I never understood the point of learning history. It was just a bunch of names and dates and places that had no meaning to me. (Thank you, textbooks.) But I am learning so much about our interesting world history through all the living books I read to my children. Just by pointing out the places we read about in the books we read, I now have excellent geography skills. Homeschooling has given me a second chance at a quality education.