Our Home Schooling Journey:
Can My Mistakes Help You?
Our home schooling journey is not one I would have predicted. In fact, before I got married, I don't think homeschooling was even on my radar screen for where I thought I would go in my life. But life can be full of changes and surprises, can't it? And we've been through quite a few in our home schooling journey.
My husband and I first met in Japan while we were both there as short term workers, teaching English in a local church and doing administrative work for our mission. What started out for both of us as testing the waters to living overseas and doing ministry has become a passion in our hearts. Our family has now spent most of the last twenty years in Asia helping train pastors in leadership principles. We love our work and the people we work with, and living in another culture for us has been a wonderful experience.
All four of our kids were born in Japan and, when they were old enough, they went to the local Japanese preschool to learn the local language and customs. While that was an enjoyable experience for them, as time went on, we realized we wanted to spend more time with our children than we could with them attending public school. We wanted to be able to pass on our values to them and enjoy learning together. We began to think about home schooling.
Home Schooling: Could I Do That?
It didn’t take too long to convince us that home schooling could be a great option for our family, especially since we move around so much and place a high value on spending time together. Home schooling would be a great way to offer stability for our children's education, and give us more time to pass our values on to our children. Thankfully, on our next extended time in the United States I was fortunate to get to know some families whom we respected and whose children, while not perfect, were on the path to becoming gracious, well-educated young men and women. We tried out the home school curriculum our friends used, Sonlight Home School Curriculum
,
and found (trumpets, please) ...
the Joy of Learning Through Home Schooling. Great! All set!
Home Schooling: Reality Sets In!
Well, the first major snag to come into this cozy home schooling picture twirled onto the scene when our second child, Ballerinagirl (I’ll use these names for them on the Internet), started home schooling. Suddenly, what seemed like the perfect home school curriculum for her older sister, Poetrygirl, wasn’t working for Ballerinagirl. She couldn’t understand it. She didn’t want to do it. She dawdled and resisted. Was she just not trying? Was it my teaching method? Did we need a new approach? More structure? Less structure?
The questions kept accumulating, but the answers seemed so elusive. Our Ballerinagirl was starting to crumple and wilt. I was starting to crumple and wilt! Yet there was still Legoboy (a preschooler) and Princessgirl (a baby) ready to join our homeschool. How was I going to teach four children when I couldn’t even teach one? I knew I needed to do something to get on the right track. I looked ahead and saw far too much teacher-time trying to read aloud all the books for my kids and try to help them do all I wanted them to do with Sonlight. Maybe I should change home schooling methods. So I began to look around at what was out there.
My Quest for the Perfect Curriculum: Take Two
I am thankful I soon found Tapestry of Grace, which was like Sonlight, with great literature selections and lots of history. Classic Tapestry (the version available then), though, was focused around a historical topic that all the children studied at their own level, thereby maximizing the effectiveness of my preparation time. It also offered lots projects, worksheets or activities to help the kids learn instead of me doing quite so many read-alouds. This sounded great to me, so we took the plunge and embarked on a new direction in our home schooling journey.
We used Classic Tapestry for two years. Some of my fondest memories of homeschooling were memories we made while studying the Middle Ages and early American history with Classic Tapestry. (You can see more about our experience with Tapestry at our Tapestry of Grace review.
While I love Tapestry of Grace for many reasons, there were several strikes against us for using Tapestry back then. First, for us living in a small space in Japan, having to buy all the books we needed, and paying for shipping to Japan, it just was getting too expensive. Part of the problem was that the Classic Tapestry offered so many choices it was hard to know which books to use. Secondly, I also found at that point in my home schooling journey I was just too much of a box-checker -- and Tapestry offered a lot of boxes to check off! So I was starting to feel overwhelmed. How could I do all that I wanted to with Tapestry? I felt burned out and tired. This home schooling journey was just too much. Wasn't there an easier way?
My Quest for the Perfect Curriculum: Take Three
So, again I went on a search for the Perfect Curriculum. This time I was perhaps a bit wiser knowing that there wasn’t any Perfect Curriculum, but I was hoping I knew enough of what I didn’t want (lots of books I had to ship to Japan and lots of teacher time on history) to know what to look for. And so in my search we found
Robinson Curriculum,
a home schooling method that focuses on giving the students the tools to learn for themselves, and which comes on CDs all ready to print out basically all the books you need. That sounded great to me. No more hours on the Internet searching for home schooling books.
The problem I found was that, though Robinson Curriculum met my desires not to be so teacher-focused, and not to have lots of books I had to buy, it didn’t meet other desires we had for our children’s education. These were desires that I didn’t even know we had until I realized that something just wasn’t working on this crazy home schooling journey. I was starting to see that I wanted to mentor my children in how to think about the world. I wanted my children to read books that were outside the scope of what Robinson offered.
Dare I say we went on the Quest for the Perfect Curriculum: Take Four?
I was realizing that Robinson wasn't a good fit for us, so I prayerfully went back to Sonlight (and believe me, each step of the way we had been praying, which made the changes in our home schooling journey that much more frustrating!). Our oldest daughter was interested in taking classes from NorthStar Academy, an online Christian home school. With her receiving outside Christian input, I felt this would give me enough time to focus on the younger kids, at least doing most of the read-alouds. But in doing two cores, and having another child off doing her own thing, I felt like I was being pulled in several different directions. There was little sense of unity or synergy in what we were learning. Here again, I felt like this was not what I had hoped for in our home schooling journey.
Asking the Fundamental Questions
In these years I began to realize that choosing curriculum is more than just using what your friends or mentors use. It is more than finding a method that suits you or your children. There are some factors that most of us don’t even stop to consider when we start out on our home schooling journey. Questions such as...
In asking these and other questions, I finally discovered some answers that helped give our family a philosophy of education that really helped guide us in making some excellent choices to our home schooling. I began to have confidence both in saying yes to buying some things, and no to buying other things. (You can sign up for our free eCourse
if you want me to walk you through the journey step by step.)
My Quest for the Perfect Curriculum: What Do We Use Now?
So, you might wonder what home school curriculum we use now. We have actually gone back to using Tapestry of Grace and are loving the Redesigned curriculum. It is much easier to teach with it and to buy the needed resources than with the older Classic Tapestry. I love learning with my children and am finding the preparation time a real blessing to my own personal development. I am thankful for how Tapestry gives me the resources to help lead my children to know how to learn on their own (my oldest two do most of their work independently, yet I still have input and we have great discussion times). I'll be posting more information shortly on our experiences with the Tapestry Redesigned.
But w also use other resources. I love the many resources Brave Writer offers, and we've used a number of their online classes. Wonderful. We also use many
Living Math recommendations and Math-U-See materials.
For science we use various curriculums including Apologia science.
Finding Confidence, Joy, and Success in Our Home Schooling Journey
So what has changed? Why is Tapestry of Grace working for us now when it didn’t before? How is it that I can now confidently leave some boxes unchecked, let other things go without guilt, and honestly say we are having the best home school year ever?
Aside from the how Tapestry Redesigned is now easier to use, for my part, a big change is that we have asked ourselves some fundamental questions about what our core beliefs about homeschooling are. (By the way, if you'd like to go through the same process I did, sign up or our free eCourse
.) This has helped me in countless ways, not only in knowing what to buy, but also in knowing how to promote joy and success for each of our unique children.
I am not the same person I was when we first started our home schooling journey. My perceptions and values have been molded by various experiences, and we’ve gone through a natural development as a family. I guess I’d say we now have a more mature understanding of who we are and where we want to go. This has helped me know how to focus my time better.
The Real Key to a Joyful, Successful Home Schooling Journey
Lastly, I have come to realize that the greatest factor in my children’s long-term educational success (and success in life) is not to be found in a home school curriculum, not even the very best one. It is to be found in the depth of relationships, both within our family and with God. There is so much to share about this and how it relates to our home schooling, and I look forward to writing more on how this works out in reality in future pages.
If I'm an expert on choosing home schooling curriculum it is only because in that I’ve made lots of mistakes and thought a lot about them. Are all our days joyful and successful? Not at all. We are still very much on the home schooling journey, with all its crazy, unexpected twists and turns. Do I always make the right choices for curriculum? No, sometimes I don't remember to follow my own advice! So I’m a few steps ahead of some people, and many steps behind others. But I hope that the mistakes I've made and the hours I've spent thinking about what made them wrong for us will help you to make wise choices about home school curriculum regardless of what curriculum you end up using.
I look forward to traveling with you on your home schooling journey. I hope you’ll bookmark this site and come back often as you think about how to choose the best home schooling curriculum products for your family. It is a privilege to walk with you even a short ways on your home schooling journey, and I pray that you will experience more joy and success in your home school because of what you find here.
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