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Why We Chose to Homeschool

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There are many reasons why families are choosing to homeschool their kids. In this post, I’m sharing the top reasons why we chose to homeschool our young kids and some resources too.

Angela of Grassfed Mama shares healthy tips for busy moms.
Angela of Grassfed Mama shares healthy tips for busy moms.

You may or may not know that Adam and I both work from home.  Because of this freedom to work from anywhere, we like to travel with the kids and go on many adventures. With my oldest daughter getting closer to being in school, it got us thinking about what we were going to do for school. My sister started homeschooling her two older kids about 2-3 years ago, and it got me really interested in the idea.

I loved the freedom you have when you homeschool.

Freedom to go at the pace of your child (faster in some skills and take longer in others), I love that you can go on vacation when it is off season, I love being able to go on field trips as a family and learn together! I’m not saying that we came to the idea of homeschooling easily… I never ever thought I would homeschool! When we talked to a few other families who were and heard their stories – it just felt like something we should at least try for ourselves!

I feel that homeschooling has really changed in the past few years as well. I have a really good friend who shared with me that she tried to homeschool her kids one year several years ago, and she had a very hard time finding resources or a community to find support. What I have really been impressed with is how much there is for us as a family who homeschools.

Our local children’s museum has homeschool days for homeschooling families to come and connect with each other. Our library also has numerous resources just for homeschooling families! I really am excited about being a part of such a helpful community.

We also want to get connected to a local co-op (we just moved into the area, so we haven’t connected with one yet, but it is on our list!) We would love to have that community that a co-op provides.

We certainly aren’t saying we are homeschooling forever – or that homeschooling is what is perfect for everyone. We are saying that for this year, homeschooling is what we are choosing. So now that we ARE homeschooling…. what will that look like???

Now to pick our lessons!

I used to be a speech therapist and had many classes about language development and learning in kids. One of the main ideas that was recurrent was to immerse kids at a very young age in reading and language activities. Knowing this, I was looking for a “curriculum” that used books as its foundation. I also love “unit” type studies too because children learn better when they are interested in the topic and can see it from different angles (reading a book, looking at a map where a book was placed, studying the culture of the characters, learning how to count in the book).

We decided we wanted to jump into this school year and use the program Five in a Row. We found that there were many resources to help us while using this curriculum and that the reviews were incredible as well in the homeschool community.

 

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Every week, you have one book that you read every day. In your teacher guide, you have activities that you can use to build on the story. The first classical book is The Story of Ping. What I loved is that Adam remembered reading this book as a kid too! So fun when parents and child can have bond over a book! 

Every day we did a different activity that built on the story: Social Studies, Geography, Literature, Art, Math, & Science. I loved how everything was congruent with the story we had read and it was easy to pull information from the story to learn in these different subjects.

Because there are lots of other homeschool resources, it was easy to make a week long unit on this great classic!

 

Here are some other activities you can use with The Story of Ping:

The Homeschool Mom Resources

Pinterest Board

Delightful Learning Week-long lesson ideas

 

Do you homeschool? What curriculum do you use and what do you like about it?

 

 

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Angela Parker
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Comments

  1. We love Tapestry of Grace! There is a wide variety of “extras” with TOG. All my kids are learning about the same time period of history. It incorporates history and literature and much more in the upper levels. It is a great fit for us!

  2. Oh, and it is a real-book curriculum, chock full of classic books! There are spines for history in the upper levels but lots of real literature reading!

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