Tina's Dynamic Homeschool Plus

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What is REAL Homeschooling? Homebound, Co-op or Public School at Home

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This post may contain affiliate links. For more information, please see my full disclosure policy.

To the world outside of homeschooling, it is hard to define the “normal homeschooler”.  Is it a family who raises chickens and who milks their own cows?

Is it a family who believes in the conveniences of city life or a family that loves fast food?

Is it a family that loves homesteading and eating only organic or is it a family who loves traveling?

We know as homeschoolers we embrace families from all backgrounds as the norm.

Satellite Schools, Cyber Schools, Independent Study Programs – Homeschooling?

More important, we understand the one common weave among so many different homeschooling families is that we all respect the right we have as parents to make the educational choices for our children.

However, as important as that choice is, it can cause quite a bit of stir in the homeschooling community to define what is real homeschooling.

Too, many new homeschoolers are joining our ranks by the hundreds and bringing with them their definition of what they may feel is homeschooling.
It is important to not only sharpen their definition of homeschooling but to remind us as veterans what is real homeschooling especially if we have seen times when homeschooling was not so freely allowed.

For example, when I was a high school freshman in public school, I got real sick and was homebound for a year.

Some people have never heard of being homebound.

What is REAL Homeschooling @ Tina's Dynamic Homeschooling Plus

My mom was not homeschooling at that time and we understood as a family that learning at home was an exception made for me because of my health. I would have to do my public school work at home.

I was simply changing the location of where I did my school.

My lessons were issued by the teacher and my parents had no say over the lessons I did and also, like a public school, the cost was free.

Did I consider myself homeschooled then? Absolutely not. Just being at home did not make me a homeschooler.

There are two very fundamental things that define what is real homeschooling.

The first significant factor is that all teaching is parent-led or parent directed.

You notice, I did not say all teaching is parent taught.

It does not have to be and that becomes important as you homeschool the upper grades where you may want to receive some outside help.

Classes offered online, private tutors, co-ops and homeschool events are all chosen by the parent.

Parent-led means that the education and instruction of the children falls squarely on the shoulders of the parent, free of government input, which is the key to understanding the very fine but clear-cut difference.

The way a parent uses a homeschool co-op too, for example, can be quite controversial today though it wasn’t that way before I started homeschooling.

I didn’t take my son out of public school to only enroll him in a 5 day “homeschool” co-op which was ran more like a private school.

I would be exchanging one task master for another had I put my son in a 5 day homeschooling co-op.

All I really would be doing would be enrolling my son in a private school and “helping” him with his homework.

I could see the difference in using a homeschooling co-op to supplement and add enrichment and relinquishing all teaching over to somebody else.

The second important point of what is real homeschooling I touched on briefly and that is you are free of public school or governmental control.

If you are newer to homeschooling, you may not fully appreciate the bristling of homeschooling parents who when they hear a family solely using a free, government backed, full online public school say that they are homeschoolers.

The second definition is not meant to put homeschoolers at odds but it is to remind all of us of our homeschooling roots and what we hold dear when it comes to homeschooling unencumbered.

Homeschooling options, like having cyber schools, have changed tremendously even since I started homeschooling.



This is a good thing because it allows more families to homeschool.  However, even with online schools, there is almost always an option to choose what is not free.

Why would a family make that choice? Because free for online public schools is not really free. You are giving up something.

Free of charge is different than freedom to educate in the way you feel is right for your family.

Homebound, Co-op or Public School at Home – Homeschooling?

Free for a lot of online public school means you are required to test, “attend” online parent teacher conference, join in live classes and more than not have a workload that has taken some homeschoolers 6 or more hours to complete.

More importantly, you are not picking and choosing the lesson planning day to day.

I have helped numerous new homeschoolers get out of on line schools because they thought they would be stress free to only find out that again, they have exchanged one taskmaster in public school for another one online.

Though free may sound inviting in the beginning, you are given up something else valuable, which is the right for your children’s education to be parent-led or directed.

This does not mean that online schools are to be avoided but it means that you want to maintain control over what your children learn day to day.

Most online schools or boxed curriculum providers have options for you to pay for the program as well or to enroll in their “free” program.

If it does not have an option for you to pay for the program then it is just an online public school.

Did you know that some states only consider a family homeschooling by law if it’s parent funded and parent directed?  Even they recognize the two fundamental differences.

Using outside sources is for sure part of homeschooling, but turning over full control of your children’s education has not ever been a definition of what is real homeschooling.

In sharing today, I am encouraging you to value and to not give up so easily the time tested methods that have worked for years and years in graduating well-educated children.

Giving over control of your homeschool changes the dynamics of your homeschooling and it’s worth every effort to be sure our homeschooling stays parent-led.

What about you? Do you think the dynamics of homeschooling has changed over the last few years?

Hugs and love ya,

 

What is NOT Homeschooling?

What Do You Fear Most About Homeschooling?

Should You Really Give Homeschooling a Trial Run?

What Do You Fear Most About Homeschooling?

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This post may contain affiliate links. For more information, please see my full disclosure policy.

What do you fear most about homeschooling?  If we could see the list of others, whose list would be longer?

  • Fear that I won’t prepare my kids for the world outside of my home.
  • Fear that my extended family that is watching ever so close will inspect us at the end of the year to see if we failed.
  • Fear that I won’t guide my children to fulfill their God given talents to the best of their ability.
  • Fear of being a perfectionist on top of that being unorganized – is that possible?
  • Fear that I will miss some vital subject.
  • Fear that my children will get behind.
  • Fear that I am the only one that loses patience with my kids.
  • Fear that I am the only one where public school looks like the perfect solution on some days.

Does your list look similar?

What would make you more confident?

Knowing that you are not alone in your fears and knowing what worked and what did not work for others is encouraging.
However, there is one noteworthy step in my experience that stand outs among all others and that is goal setting.

What Do You Fear Most About Homeschooling @ Tina's Dynamic Homeschool Plus

Goals are not only essential but they are crucial.

Fears are normal in the beginning when homeschooling, but what is more important to remember is that you are now swimming upstream so to speak.  You are going against the norm and that requires hard work.

Goals energize us to stay focused on our family’s needs.

We will avoid just floating along, responding to the moment or jumping ship to adopt the newest trend in homeschooling when our goals are specific and measurable.

The second important thing to remember is that your journey will be unique.

This point is so important I want to say it again.

Though some of your experiences will mirror my experiences and other homeschoolers, they will not all be the same.

How to Make a Strong Start in Homeschooling

Bottom line is you have to be able to measure progress for your own unique journey and you need a way to do that.

Look at how setting goals reduces fears, gives you very specific ways to measure the progress of your unique family and fortifies you for each year.

  • We make progress based on our family’s need.
  • Instead of wasting time checking out all the latest trends in homeschooling, we are analyzing our own efforts and measuring progress within our own family.
  • We avoid boredom and a stagnant year because we are focused on whether we need to speed up our homeschooling journey or slow it down to meet our family’s need.
  • Homeschooling is more purposeful and inspirational because out time is focused on meeting goals instead of coasting along.

Though I have made some pretty pages for you to write your homeschool goals on, you can write them anywhere.

I tout it all the time and that is though goals may sound good in our mind, when we put them to paper they are concrete.

Don’t ever forget what brought you to homeschooling in the first place.

If our goals and reasons are not in plain sight each day we give in to fear.

As time passes, it happens to all us and that is we forget why we chose homeschooling as a superior education.  Those reasons quell any fears and keeps us plodding forward.

Like the subjects we teach our children, reminders are needed throughout the years when fears resurface.

Overcoming fears happens by not only arming yourself with homeschool knowledge but with goals.

When your goals are met each year, you don’t need the validation of others, either by testing or by family approval.

What are your fears about homeschooling? Where are your goals?

Hugs and love ya,

Tina 2015 Signature

Also, check out these other posts.

When You Feel Like a Homeschool Failure

When does homeschooling become “normal”?

 

Homeschooling A Trial Run?

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This post may contain affiliate links. For more information, please see my full disclosure policy.

No matter what our knowledge of the homeschool world is when we begin, the thought of giving homeschooling a trial run crosses our mind during our journey.

I had a younger sister who was homeschooled and I knew quite a bit about the homeschooling world then, but I still thought I should be prepared to send my first son back to public school.


Homeschool Trials – A Sign of Weakness?

What if my son missed out on opportunities that only the public school could offer?

What if the public school teacher was more prepared than myself on a particular subject?

What would I do if we got to high school and I didn’t have a science lab?

What field trips would he miss out on?

What I have learned is that we can’t lead our lives, teach our children or fully enjoy the benefits of homeschooling based on “what ifs”.
We will either be insane, live in a state of constant panic and fear or we can choose now to intentionally homeschool.

Now, when I think about homeschooling being a trial run it’s like saying: “I’ll give my newborn a year. Because if I don’t have a great year, we’ll we just can’t keep him.”

That may sound like a way out there analogy but homeschooling half-heartedly was paralyzing and insane.

I think about all the preparation I made for nine months when I had my first born.


I thought everything would go perfect, along with our perfect crib, perfect schedule and perfect baby because well — I planned, right?

If I had judged my whole parenthood by the first year with my oldest son, I wouldn’t have had any more kids because very few of my expectations were met.

It was not rock-a-bye-baby with my first son.

The sleepless nights, constant calls to the doctor and worrying, the nights up pacing, rocking, digging for information to understand him was met by lots of hard work and on the job training.  It was much more time than I even imagined.

Homeschooling is very similar.

I homeschool to enjoy the freedom, to have better standards, to give more time, to tailor the curriculum, to give my children a better future, to give my sons a better foot hold in life, to build Godly character, to foster sibling relationships, to build a relationship with God, to capture my child’s heart, to make learning a delight for the child and on and on.

Homeschooling A Trial Run @ Tina's Dynamic Homeschool Plus

I was not giving that up.

Along the way, I figured out this would not happen if I kept looking back instead of looking forward.

After my momentary lapse of fear when I put my son back in school for less than a year and took him back out, I realized that ruling out public school as an option from the beginning was the only way I could whole heartedly homeschool.

Too, though in the beginning my fears were more about not being able to meet my sons’ academic needs, the turns and twists of life have proven more challenging than meeting the academic ones.

Extended sicknesses by family members, deaths in our extended family, change of employment, financial ups and downs, pregnancy, and moving have been challenges that have you second guessing your journey.

Breaking all ties with public school was the best thing I did for our family. Why?

Because meeting the challenges of life was done best without interference with the public school schedule.

Public school may seem like a blessed relief in the beginning, but relief can quickly turn to restraint after the initial phase has passed.

Year-end testing, homework in the evenings and giving up control of what your children will be learning and when, were not things that I wanted to add to an already stressful time.

I weathered all the personal challenges I mentioned above and my homeschool conviction was stronger because of it.

At the time when I was making trips back and forth to the ICU in the hospital to care for my husband, laying on the couch because I was so nauseated each day of my pregnancy that I couldn’t hardly move to take care of my other children and driving hours and hours back and forth from my house to my mother’s house to care for my very sick mother, I felt my sons were going to be so behind in their academics that public school would be a relief.

Academics – Perk of Homeschooling?

Tears followed and the feeling of defeat loomed.
What I have come to treasure, value and hold on to is that out of every one of life’s challenges, we raced ahead, caught up and even moved ahead at certain times.
Along through the years, I taught my sons about compassion, nurturing older ones and the value of precious life. What a blessing!

Here are my answers now to the above questions:

If I sent my children back to public school, it would be giving them less as I can offer more even when the road blocks of life happen.

Yes, I have gaps in my education and will make mistakes. Through the years, I have seen plenty of mistakes in textbooks though.

Many professionals will know more on subjects than me, but I am the parent I don’t have to know the subjects, my children do.

I can hire private tutors, use DVDs, have my sons take on line classes and use co-ops and not to mention learn right along with my kids and I did.

We still don’t have a science lab.

We have something better, a fully stocked kitchen that is the perfect science lab.

Field trips are not taken once a year or a few times in the early years and then almost non-existent in the older grades, which is the norm in public school.

I did better. We have taken monthly field trips for every year and the field trips are some of my boys best learning moments. The tales we have to tell you now.

I don’t view myself as a particularly courageous or brave person, but through each hurdle, I was fortified, fueled and empowered for the next challenge and unswerving in my determination to stick to homeschooling.

Keep looking forward to your end goals and don’t measure your whole homeschooling career in front of you by one or two years. It is worth every effort and sacrifice.

What about you? Have you chosen to intentionally homeschool NOW?

Don’t give in thinking the other path is easier, check out these posts:

Hugs and love ya,

When You Feel Like a Homeschool Failure

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This post may contain affiliate links. For more information, please see my full disclosure policy.

Admitting homeschool failure is not easy. Homeschooling has always been the right choice for our family although many years I wasn’t sure if I was the right teacher for the job.

When You Feel Like a Homeschool Failure

When you feel like a homeschool failure as a teacher, it can be a pretty gray period because you feel like you have really messed up your children.

I was a contributing factor for Mr. Senior 2013 getting behind in math.

Yep I did, I messed him up. First, let me tell what I did and then tell you what I learned.

Homeschool Failure or Wrong Ways to Homeschool?

We had been using Math U See and I didn’t think he was absorbing the formulas as well as I thought he should; I switched him to Teaching Textbooks right before high school.

Shortly after we started using it during high school, I realized that Teaching Textbooks put him behind and that he was actually ahead of where I thought he was. 

So we switched back to Math U See.

Can I just tell you how bad I felt?

Although I had been homeschooling for a while, I still didn’t recognize that Mr. Senior 2013 was just at a plateau and that some of the concepts he would soon understand.

Look at some of these tips that helped me to sort through the feelings of failure I had and get us back on track.

What if they are not just getting it? 

This is a tough one because each child is different and many factors affect whether or not your child is understanding a certain subject or curriculum.

Looking back now, I should have backed up to the point where Mr. Senior 2013 understood the curriculum and isolate the math concept instead of right thinking it was the total curriculum.

When I did this later on after I made the switch of course, I realized he was getting most of Math U See, but had only reached some upper level math that required a bit more time to understand.

Questioning Your Homeschool

I knew Mr. Senior’s 2013 ability to work at higher levels and instead of accepting his difficulties as part of his development, I thought he needed to keep sprinting forward. Pushing was the mistake on my part.

I knew Mr. Senior 2013 excelled at math and did not need constant repetition.

Instead of trusting his learning style, I was afraid that I was going to hold him back and in the process I did.

What I am trying to say is that his learning style was not going to change over night and I should have looked at other things that affected him instead of just the curriculum.

What do I feel like we are going backwards? That was another question I had to ask myself.

I had to analyze everything we were doing. Was I not spending enough time with him because the younger boys were tugging at my time?

Was his schedule too full?

Knowing that Mr. Senior 2013 flourished with routine, was I allowing too many outside activities to interfere with our routine.  These were all questions I had to go back and answer.

As I have learned now, one solution would have been to take off a month and do review and go back over previous mastered material.

I could have easily grabbed one of those inexpensive work texts and just let him sat at his comfortable level for a bit until the frustration passed.

It was hard for me to come up with that solution because math is one of his best subjects.

I just didn’t realize then that my kids would even need to step back in subjects they excelled in.

Last thing I wanted to do was to bore him with previous mastered material.

That was just the thing he needed as he was going through a period of physical growth.

School had to to take a second seat to allow time for his physical and emotional development.

Is the problem in just one subject? This is another tell-tale sign of how I knew it was developmental.

When we had problems before, it was normally one subject and that is a clue that maybe I needed to switch out that one curriculum.

Other things were going on in my son’s life that helped me to see that the curriculum was not the culprit.

He pretty much struggled with the everyday basics of doing school.

I didn’t take this lightly because this was my kid who was such a joy to teach because he loved routine and didn’t have to be told to start school.

Again, it’s easier to look back now. At the time I felt like I pretty much was failing my child because I didn’t have the luxury of looking forward.

Mr. Senior 2013 was going through changes when I did a honest self-evaluation.

He was getting real mouthy, disagreeing pretty much with everything I said, started looking for a job and expressed his concern about supporting himself.

I finally understood that when I felt like a homeschool failure that my son needed me more than ever. Not all failures are a “curriculum thing”.

He couldn’t figure out what was wrong with our homeschooling because of his inexperience. 

I needed to step up and help us sort through it without my son feeling like I was going to send him to public school or throw in the towel either one.

Instead of feeling like a homeschool failure, I realized the time was closing in on how much time I would have with Mr. Senior 2013.

Mistake I Will Never Make Again

I focused on the satisfaction of knowing that his changes in puberty was a part of his life that I was proud to be part of as me and my husband guided him along.

When You Feel Like a Homeschool Failure

Experiences like feeling like a homeschool failure build a deep down resolve and dogged determination to keep on homeschooling when you come through them and can finally pinpoint the problem.

Update 2020: As I write this, my three kids have graduated and are now adults. I’m mentoring a preschooler.

All the tears, all the worry, all the stress pales into comparison to how well-rounded and successful each of my kids are. What I’ve learned is that teaching my kids about defeat, how to get up, and move on have been of way more value in their every day life than being behind.

I’ve learned it was IMPOSSIBLE to teach everything, but I taught them how to research everything they wanted to know. When they have perceived gaps now as adults, they are not intimidated. I can’t hold back my happy tears.

Moms, you GOT THIS!

Look at these other tips about how to find solutions when you feel like nothing is working.

What about you? Does this resonate with you?

Hug and love ya,

Tina 2015 Signature
When You Feel Like a Homeschool Failure @ Tina's Dynamic Homeschool Plus

The One Question Homeschooled Kids Dread Answering

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This post may contain affiliate links. For more information, please see my full disclosure policy.

Besides answering questions to relatives about what my kids have been learning and no I don’t mean the kind of genuine questions where my extended family is interested, but the kind where they think they can quiz my kids to find out if they are truly learning, there is one question dreaded more by my kids.

The one question homeschooled kids dread answering is what grade they are in. And when my kids shrug their shoulders and answer with, “I don’t know”, that just gives the relatives one more thing to bristle about.

When kids have not been exposed to public school grade levels and they have not learned to keep pace with a grade level, they really don’t know what grade they are in and guess what? Most kids don’t care.

As my kids have grown older and see the shrieks of terror on some adult’s faces because my kids have no idea what grade they are, my kids try to reply as best they can.

When Mr. Senior 2013 was in fourth grade and without any prodding from me, he replied, “Which subject?” The reply made complete sense to me.

I learned a few things from that encounter:

It was probably best to prepare my kids for questions like that because most people are asking just to be polite;

It was a reminder to me that I had released myself from the bondage of graded level learning because my kids were all over the place in each subject and it was a good feeling;

That my kids were being allowed to learn at their own pace;

That I did recognize the differences in each of my kids because they were accomplishing skills at different grade levels; and

That if I had to reply to it I probably would have to say something like he is in 9th grade reading, 7th grade grammar, 8th grade math, 7th grade writing. .. oh my!

Through the years, I have found it better to reply with a more general reply like he is in middle school or high school.

Too, I find a more general reply avoids a lot of confusion even for my sons. For example, we may have started a new curriculum mid-year and my sons may reply they are in one grade level for that year and then still be in that same grade level the beginning of the next year.

To avoid my kids feeling confused, which are the only ones I am concerned about when answering that question, I just have them reply in generalities by saying middle school or elementary school.  The kids understand there are about 3 or 4 grades considered for any level, even high school.

Sometimes, the boys reply by saying their age and then the adult can figure it out on their own.

Besides how many people would understand that you may be starting pre-algebra with a 11 year old or a 5th grader reading high school level literature?

How about you? Do your kids know which grade they are in?

Hugs and love ya,

2012Tinasignature 3 Reasons You Wouldn’t Want to Homeschool

Also, check out some other comebacks here:

“I’m homeschooling because I want them socialized”

How do I SOCIALIZE my kids?

Gauging Homeschool Progress – Masters of their Material?