Back to School
Back to school. It looks a lot different for us than it used to. We started back this week, meeting up with our weekly homeschool co-op group at this beautiful spot. There was no rushing to get school supplies and no mad dash for the right outfits. We met, we learned, and we visited. We will spend the rest of this week cracking open our new books, planning out our next few experiments, and starting the first few chapters of our selected novels.
If you would have told us 20 years ago we would be homeschooling our kids, I would have said you were crazy. Brandon and I both dedicated years of serving in public schools as educators and school leaders. Our three older kids all started and graduated from public school. Our oldest son took a very traditional track where he focused on sports and later Advanced Placement courses. Our oldest daughter cheered, showed an animal in FFA, and eventually found her stride taking online courses through the high school and community college and ended up graduating early when she was 16 years old. Our middle daughter recently graduated from our local high school where she was the varsity cheer co-captain and is now cheering for the university where she recently started college.
But for our younger two kids, we opted into homeschooling for no other reason than we gave ourselves the permission to try it. When Brandon and I both found ourselves working from home during the pandemic, we also found ourselves carving out a slower pace of life. We found we wanted more freedom within our schedules, we wanted to be creative in when and how our kids learn, and we wanted to be a part of their daily learning experiences.
Like anything, homeschooling has had its ups and downs, and we have all learned a lot. As a former high school English teacher who feels confident teaching Shakespeare and college essay writing, teaching our son to read was more of a challenge than I had thought. And while I have dealt with some pretty tough kids throughout my years in education, I cannot think of anything tougher than dealing with your own.
But it has been a beautiful experience as well. We have learned what works and does not work, we have learned to be flexible, and we have learned what a gift time together can be. We have all learned to have more confidence in what is possible.
Most importantly, we have learned to give ourselves permission. Permission to try, to do what is on our hearts, and to take a bet on ourselves. Of everything we will teach our kids, we are most grateful for these lessons.
