Almost Unschooling Grama

  There are 3 things I want you to know about homeschooling.   #1 It doesn’t have to be a full-time job. #2 It doesn’t have to take a ton of money. #3 It doesn’t take a whole lot of brains or any special training.   Most of us have grown up in the traditional school system and as a result, we think that education takes 6-9 hours a day, costs huge amounts, and requires a master’s degree. I mean, after all, that’s what we’ve always experienced so it has to be so. Right? Well, the truth is that every story sounds true until you hear the other side and most of us have never heard the other side.   Here’s the other side: I homeschooled all 3 of my kids with a budget of around $50/ year while I worked full-time outside the home and the highest degree I hold is an AA. On top of all that, for the first several years I homeschooled I was very sick with an underdiagnosed illness. Many people in my community thought I was crazy and pitied my kids because of ...

Homeschooling is hard, but then, so is parenting. If you are even close to being a decent parent, you are already doing most of the things a homeschooler does. If you are brave enough to take the plunge, it’s likely you will find that homeschooling fine-tunes your parenting skills, helps you understand how your children think and strengthens your relationship with them. Most homeschoolers who stick it out for a year or two find themselves on the other side of the fence: Sending their children to a traditional school seems like the harder education option.  If you have a child in a traditional school, the likelihood is that you are already spending as much time or more than the typical homeschool parent spends on educating a child. How can that be? A child in a typical school has to be readied for school every morning, then there’s transport, homework after-school, extra-curricular activities, etc., not to mention all the stress caused by doing these things when the child...