Homeschooling: 2018 Has Been AWESOME

This last year has been INSANE! As a homeschooling parent, I have been totally digging into some new curriculum. By the time all my kids are in college…I will still not be an expert at homeschooling. I think one of the reasons I love homeschooling so much is the fact that it is this living, breathing monstrosity that constantly makes me stretch outside comfort zones and keeps me learning right along with my kiddos.

This last year my oldest started college. He is only 17 and still small for his age, so he gets a lot of comments from other students about how young he looks. I think he would have been uncomfortable in the past with people commenting on how he stands out in life, but he has grown into an incredibly funny guy and finds the whole “Yikes, how old are you?” question to be a great opener to telling the universe about how much he loved being homeschooled. My kids are so strange!

Tanner got into the college he wanted and into the program he was hoping to pursue. When he first came home asking to step outside the traditional public schooling path, I was scared to death. But the past 6 years of homeschooling my kids has given me an opportunity to build courage and find relationships with other parents who home school their kids. It is a much bigger and braver community than I could have imagined, and I’m so thankful to the men and women who have helped me navigate a course I never imagined I would be taking. Some of these families have homeschooled all of their kids from kindergarten through high school, and I have a few friends with 7 or more children…I don’t know how they do it. These parents and children have helped us find peace in the journey. They’ve taught me to let go of what I thought education should be and embrace what education is for my family.

Jake has started high school through the BYU online program. It is a rigorous educational program and I think we will take a couple steps back from the way I did things with my last high school kiddo. I am planning on enrolling Jake in some community college courses for fall and will go ahead and audit the classes with him. I didn’t think I’d be going back to college after I finished my master’s degree. Yet here we are…and I am taking freshmen courses again. This is one relentless reminder that my plans have to remain fluid if I want to let the kids take charge of how they go about learning, and it is one heck of a humbling experience.