Sam and I both decided on homeschooling for our children so I've been taking time to learn as much as I can about it. When I used to work at the YWCA years ago, we used to get a lot of homeschoolers enrolled in our classes. Truthfully I knew these kids pretty well through coaching but never really paid attention to what homeschooling was about. Also when I was working I had a manager who homeschooled all 5 of his children, again at the time I didn't pay too much attention.
Since Nathan was born it has been something we'd been interested in off and on and I'm no longer in touch with the families from my YWCA days or my old manager but I really wanted more information on it. I found out one of my cousins pulled her 3 girls from school and had been homeschooling for a year and I contacted her and she couldn't say enough good things about it.
So I went to a homeschool conference not too long ago. I'd venture to say there were over 5000 people at the conference. It was a two day conference and had tons of workshops. The nice part about it was most of the parents came with their children and I got really bold and would just walk up to people and introduce myself and tell them my how young my children were and how I was planning on homeschooling and I'd conduct a mini interview with them on the spot.
Everyone I stopped was more than willing to talk to me and I got so many people's contact information. I talked to people who were just starting out along with people who had graduated some children etc. I was delighted to talk to quite a few teenagers and get their perspectives. It was a wonderful experience. There's so many myths about homeschooling that just aren't true at all and it's amazing when you start to research something how much you can learn about it and how so many things you thought can end up being wrong.
It was interesting to learn the pros and cons of homeschooling, what are the success rates of homeschoolers and what makes them successful, also another interesting thing to me was how many former teachers were there who are now homeschooling their children. I'd venture to say over half of the people there used to be school teachers (I'm saying this because during one of the keynote speeches they asked the former school teachers to stand and over half the crowd stood.) Another thing that intrigued me was that the speaker noted that statistically it's usually harder for someone who is an ex school teacher to homeschool than it is for a parent who hasn't taught.
It was interesting because a huge myth is if you haven't been a teacher than how can you homeschool. So during my networking I asked some of my new found friends who were ex teachers why this was and if they agreed with the speaker and I didn't run into one who didn't agree (I didn't ask a TON but I asked a few). The reason is they're used to teaching a certain way to a big group of students. Home classes are smaller and at home you can tailor your lessons to the individual when at school what you teach is general to a whole class and not the individual. And homeschooling is different than schooling which is something most people who don't know anything about homeschooling don't realize (I didn't realize that either). And for those who were teachers they have to do away with most of the methods they used in the school classroom in order to teach at home.
I continue to read as many books as I can get my hands on and I continue to network with people. I've come in contact with a few more people since leaving the conference who are homeschooling (it's actually a lot more common now than people may think). Also Nathan's speech therapist is a huge homeschooling advocate, so she provides us with a ton of information that is so helpful.
Anyway I could write a week long series on what I learned about homeschooling over the last year, I'm in contact with so many people, I have links to so many blogs and a pile of books etc. it's become one of my favorite topics but I won't lol. When our children are older maybe I'll start a homeschooling blog about my experiences who knows.
Also prayer and bible reading has become a way of life for me. I said at times that some positive things do come out of a bad situation and my life has been filled with prayer lately. There's a really good sermon I'm going to post below by Pastor Cymbala of the Brooklyn Tabernacle in New York on prayer.
So many Christians don't pray enough and don't know how to pray and I learned from this experience with Nathan that sometimes God will put you in a position where you're FORCED to learn. I liken it to a sink or swim situation and this has been that for me.
It's taken me awhile to get to this point even in the midst of the journey it's taken me awhile and I'm still growing but I've grown to love talking to God all the time. Taking all of my fears to Him.
No offense to anyone who've tried but the greatest comfort from a dark situation can come only from our Savior. If you're in a dark situation there's nothing wrong with calling people but I promise you, no one will be able to comfort you like Christ. Read his word and call out to him.
A good book I recommend is Traveling Light. I read it years ago but pulled it off my bookshelf recently to read again and it's just a wonderful book.
God Bless
No comments:
Post a Comment