Homeschool: Why?

Yep, you read that right. Ben and I are seriously considering homeschooling our children.

Well, actually...

It's more like,  yes! We are going to start with homeschooling our children!

We have been talking, and praying, a talking some more and researching and we prayed some more. We feel like this may be a real good decision for our family.

We understand the pros and cons of homeschooling. All of which we took into serious thought. 

Ben and I both when to public school!!! So its not anything new to us what goes on!

Also I went to a private school with home school like curriculum for all my high school. So that is nothing new to me. We have the best of both worlds in our family. :) 

One of the biggest things that we have talked about is the social aspect of it all. We definitely did not want our children to have a hard time with talking and connecting with people of their age. Ben is more concerned about it than I am.  I already take the kids out a few times a week to do activities with their friends, go to the library and we recently just started doing Mrs. D's music class together as a family. On top of that, with church on Sundays, I am okay with how much social interaction my kids have. 

The second thing that really concerned me was Josiah and how often he gets sick. Probably once a month during the cold times of the year we take him to the doctor for his breathing. This takes a lot of time and after the visit it takes a few more days after that to get him back to being his awesome boy self. ;)  We barely go outside when he is like this because the cold and running around make it much worse and takes longer for him to get better. 

Can you imagine if he is still struggling and had to go to public school? He would miss so much and I wouldn't doubt that he would fall behind and would have a difficult time keeping up with his classmates. 

At least with homeschooling he can learn at home and if he does get sick a few days of getting better won't hurt his lessons.

Those were the two biggest reasons for us to want to home school.

The way that we are going to go about it is we are going to take it one year at a time. 

Preschool? We will see how it goes! If I am still confident that I can do it when he is finished with his preschool lessons then we will move on to kindergarten. 

Kindergarten? We will see how that goes!

So on and so forth. It will get easier and once I get the hang of homeschooling Eden, it will be a breeze.

There was the discussion on "What if our kids really want to go to public school?"

Well, when they are at that age that they really want to and ask us if they can we will tell them why we chose to home school them. 

We will give them awhile to think about what they asked and if they still want to go to public school we will enroll them into the new school year. I am not going to hold them back from what they really want to do. I just want my children to be strong in their faith and be able to handle the peer pressure that goes along with it. I understand that homeschooling may not be all the way to graduation. I am prepared for changing things up so that my kids excel the best they can in school whether public or at home. 

So far home school seems like something that will work for our family. I am really excited to get started and learn how to be a teacher to my children. 

The home school curriculum that we most likely be starting is the ACE(Accelerated Christian Education) program. It is the same one that I did all through out my high school. I love the scriptures that they put into the booklets(they call them PACEs). I am really comfortable on how the system works and since I am the one going to be teaching our children, I think that I have the say on which program we use. :)

I'll include the link to the program here

I ordered some information from them and they have a quick start kit for just under $20. 

I can't wait to talk about our new home school journey with you all! 

I am so excited!!

Love, Jess