Reasons for changing our educational journey

Never fear...the silence on here is not because I have already disappeared under the burden of having the boys at home :) My Internet access is limited due to all the building work taking place at home. Once it is finished it will be well worth the disruption though. Daniel's first home ed lessons took place on the front room floor while the kitchen was being demolished!!!!!



Just before we formally began home educating I wrote down all our reasons for doing so. If I typed them out in full I would be here all night! I could simply say it is because we believe it to be God's will for us as a family at this time. True as that may be it is a bit simplistic. So I will attempt to explain our reasons for leaving the state education system and take full responsibility for our children's education. If any of my readers are not Christians then you may not like my reasons- but they are the reasons we have and so I am not going to pretend they don't exist.

1) God has answered prayer about this issue- turning my husbands heart toward HE when before he was not sure yet now he is fully supportive. We met a wonderful Christian educator from America (Mr Ong) who was so balanced in his discussions and willing to accept whatever decision people made- it helped to negate some of the very abrasive opinions we had been given about HE.

2) Dan Doodle is a lovable and interesting little boy. Many of our reasons had to do with him personally- and I do not think it is fair to share them all on here. But his poor concentration skills, his constant tiredness during term time and the amount of behaviour we were having to correct all played a part.

3) We want our boys to love to learn. Not to learn because they are told to. Not to see learning as being confined to the classroom. Not to get bored with certain subjects and grow to hate them because they 'have' to do them. Not to learn just to get certain grades, but to want to learn for learning's sake. Doodle was very resistant to doing ANYTHING with us at home that was learning related whilst at school as he had had enough during the week.

4) We feel that it is our responsibility. We have always been educating our children- and sharing the responsibility with the education system- but now we feel that it is our time to take full responsibility for it.

5) We want more control over what our boys are exposed to- what they see, hear and learn.We have no desire to cut them off from their friends but we want time spent in the home surrounded by our values to outweigh time spent elsewhere.

6) We want God to be openly acknowledged in our learning framework. We have not pursued a 'christian education' but we want to show our boys the daily reality of our faith - God isn't just for Sunday!

7) It will be a good thing for us as a family. We can learn and grow together and God willing as the boys grow older we can really know them and have good friendships with them as well as parenting them.

8) We can be flexible- to have visits, to choose what we learn, to tailor it to them, to go on holiday when it suits etc etc etc.

9) We can pray about and address issues as they arise- we will be much more aware of problems as we will see them ourselves.

This is not going to be easy. It will take oceans of patience and be very tiring at times. We will get frustrated . We will feel like we have failed. But we are acting in obedience to God's will for us a s a family and so do this in Hi's strength.

So those, in kind of a nutshell, are our reasons. Not very succinct- am sure I will fine tune it over the years!!! They are not in anyway meant to imply that others not doing this are outside of God's will either- the decision to home educate is a personal, family by family matter.

So far we are going OK,.We are pursuing a classical format of education- Maybe I will post about that another time. We have not started much with Mooky as yet, and that will take a bit more imagination on my part........I think I need to get my house back before I can embark on any more planning :)