How to Start Homeschooling

One of the questions I’ve gotten about homeschooling from other mama’s is: How do you start? 

My answer is generally something like: “Did you teach your kid how to walk? We’ll you’ve already started homeschooling them.”

We start teaching them as soon as they can open those beautiful baby blue eyes and start looking at us.  But more likely the question is more about what curriculum to use or how to stay legal.

Here’s my steps in getting started:

• Ask around – find what others have done
• Get legal – find out what the requirements are for your state
• Figure out your style – there are a ton of options out there
• Figure out your schedule – this topic could fill a book – AND DOES!!

One of the best places to start is by asking around.  You more than likely know at least one person who is homeschooling their children or at least someone who is researching it.  I asked my friends on Facebook and got back a variety of responses – some positive, some negative.

Another great resource is the HSLDA which is a legal website and service.  It has information on the legal requirements of each state.

We’re using Calvert for our curriculum and I’ll talk more about why we’ve chosen this particular plan in another post.  It will blow your mind when you find out how many options you have for teaching your kids.  There’s online, off line, structured, unstructured, religious, non-religious, the choices can be staggering.  I’ll go into more detail about this soon.

Lastly, you need to figure out how you want school to work in your home.  Do you want to have school 5 days a week? 6?  Half days here and there to accommodate extracurricular activities or Homeschool co-ops?

There’s a ton of stuff to decide but don’t let that deter you.  You CAN do this.

Reasons to homeschool

We have been fielding a few questions about why we are choosing to homeschool P and G.  Here is reason number 1:

Yes, that is a home explosion.  The authorities believe that the man injured was cooking meth in the empty apartment.  The empty apartment RIGHT ACROSS THE STREET FROM THE SCHOOL MY CHILDREN WOULD ATTEND.

In our county, the child must attend kindergarten at the assigned school, after that, you may enter a lottery to possibly attend another public school.  I don’t want my kids anywhere near this place.  This incident happened last August and it is still sitting like this.  I don’t know if insurance isn’t paying or if the owner has just given up or what.

So you add in the awful test scores of the school PLUS this incident and I don’t want the kids NEAR this place.

Eight Years Ago

Whiskas Cat Food Commercial

Eight years ago, when I was grieving the loss of my mother, I found it necessary to get help.

That help came in the form of antidepressants and a lovely therapist by the name of Jody.  She was a very sweet lady and I liked her immediately.  Her office was close and she had late office hours so I could visit her on my way home from work.

During one of those visits, the topic of coping mechanisms came up.  It will come to no surprise to anyone that knows me that I cope with just about everything - from happiness to depression – with food.  It’s something that I will one day beat.  Jody wanted me to come up with a few things that I could do to cope that did not include “Go to Japanese restaurant. Order shrimp teriyaki and California Rolls.  REPEAT.” 

The video on this page is one of the things I came up with.  This video will make me smile no matter what.  The night that I spent in the emergency room, wondering if I was going to lose Griffin when I was 17 weeks pregnant, I watched this video on my phone.  The night that I took Phoebe to the emergency room with a broken collar bone, I watched this video with her and she loved it.  Basically, this video has the power to make me happy.

I hope you enjoy it too.

Scrapbooking

I still really love to scrapbook.  I recently bought a Silhouette Cameo Electronic Cutting Tool and have rediscovered all the things that I love like being creative and putting different colors together but being able to cut things easily.

I designed this page for my MOMS Club Scrapbook event in a couple of weeks and I’ll use the Cameo to cut the word September and the photo frame with the 2011 cut out.  I’ll also use it to cut the Real Red page mat.

I designed this as a progressive page because some of our members only scrapbook letter size and some scrapbook 12x12.  The club scrapbook is 8x8 so for that I just pop out the red portion and print a photo and I’m done.

I don’t like pork

But I like bacon.

And pork loin cooked in the slow cooker with bbq sauce.

And pork chops.  And I especially want to try THESE pork chops.

I like ham – the ham from the Honeybaked store is divine.

So I like all kinds of pork dishes, but what I really don’t like is pork roast.

Except I’d like some of my grandmother’s pork roast with sweet potatoes (or as she called it “possum and taters”).

So why do I say I don’t like pork?