There are many reasons not to homeschool; time and money are among the top two – and these are valid reasons. I am grateful to have a job that was exclusively work from home during the pandemic and a majority work from home even after the offices open again. It makes it possible to add that flexibility to our home even while we have student loans and a mortgage payment. Our homeschool will not look like anyone else’s, and I don’t think it is supposed to. Because it looks so different, it can be important to remember why we make the choices we do, and this is a list of some of the top reasons we choose to homeschool our kids.
Homeschooling frees our yearly schedule.
There are times throughout the year that we have events we want to attend, and homeschooling means we can do that without having to consider how many days of school the kids might miss. We almost always spend a week in Tennessee during the fall. We visit Afa’s family in Southern California, and we attend church conferences. We do our best to schedule these trips at non-peak travel times so that the airline tickets are more affordable. If we had to be on a school schedule, there would be much less flexibility about when we could do these things. Our year would have to be tied to the school calendar, and homeschooling frees us from that.
Homeschooling frees our daily schedule.
The kids don’t have to wake up at a certain time. There’s no morning rush or afternoon interruption to go pick up the kids. Our daily flow belongs to us.We have a general daily flow because it helps both the kids and I to know what to expect each day, and we have anchors to our day that include breakfast, nap time, park time each day. The rest of the day is flexible. If I have meetings in the morning, the kids have more free time then. If my meetings are in the afternoon, we do more formal lessons in the morning. If we want to take the day off to go to the zoo, we can do that too. Our days belong to us.
The Bible is part of our lives and our education.
We each have quiet times in the morning, and we work on Scripture memorization for a few minutes each day. The Bible is one of our main text books in both history and geography. Then we use the Bible to encourage one another and to train and discipline the children. It is woven through our lives each day so that the kids learn it is not a book that is important on Sundays or even the 20 minutes we have our quiet times. It is the foundation of our decisions.
Our favorite Bible for the children to read during the quiet times or free read times is the Action Bible, and we use the ESV for our study and memorization.
I get to spend every day with the kids.
The one character in the Bible I have always identified with is Martha. She loves Jesus with her whole heart, yet she was distracted by the busy-ness of life. That sentence describes me as accurately as it does Martha. There are so many busy distractions that I allow to divert my attention from the most important things. If my kids went to school, I would only have a few hours in the evenings to spend with them, and I can easily see myself filling that time with activities, extracurriculars, and meetings so that we could go days without spending quality time together. My natural tendency to always be “busy” and “productive” would quickly overtake many chances for connection with the kids.
By homeschooling, I am forcing myself out of that natural state. The kids are home with me all the time. There are still opportunities to allow that same busy-ness to overtake us, but it is not as easy. Even though we are not radical unschoolers, I incorporate many of the principles into our homeschooling days to ensure that the children have plenty of unstructured time. This helps them rest and regulate and gives us all time to be together without having to do things.
Homeschooling encourages self-directed education.
As humans, we really only learn what we want to learn. School manipulates children into wanting to learn some things through grades and external rewards and punishments; but in order to learn, the child has to decide that they want to. With our brand of homeschooling, the kids have much more reign in what they are learning. If they decide that they love one particular point in history, we can hang out there for weeks. We can make costumes, write plays, build forts because we are not tied to a schedule or a curriculum. We are simply learning together.
Using the curriculum we have acts as a guide and opens windows to new subjects and time periods, which I am grateful for. I am woefully ignorant about classical music, poetry, and art. Thankfully, those are all part of the curriculum we chose, so we can learn about them together. As they find one artist or poet fascinating, it is an opportunity for me to learn to. But we are not married to the curriculum. So if one part is not working for us, we can either drop it or change it. No one is testing us or requiring that we complete anything. We are able to chart our own course working with each other.
Homeschooling allows us to move anywhere, anytime.
We live in the Bay Area, so when we decided to buy a house, finding one we could afford seemed impossible. In fact, we were told that finding a three bedroom house on our budget might actually be impossible. God is much bigger than that, and I am so very grateful for the house we have that meets all of our needs. I am also grateful that we didn’t have to consider the school district we live in when looking for a house. Buying the house that met all of our needs zoned for an elementary school that rated highly would have been far outside our budget. By homeschooling the kids, we removed one barrier from finding a house that worked for us.
We can also move between cities, states, or even countries easily. We do not have to worry about how credits transfer or school calendars line up. Afa and I want to move to Tonga one day, and we will be able to pack the kids and not have to worry about how it will impact their education (on top of all the other worries that type of move brings) because their education is as mobile as we are. We will pack up and go.
Homeschooling is not for everyone, and it’s not even a viable choice for some people. I am so grateful that it works for us. There are so many reasons it fits our family well, and I am excited to see where it takes us in the future.