Adventures in Home Schooling

Due to some extremely inappropriate behavior on behalf of the horrible people that run the Catholic school my daughter attended from Kindergarten to 2nd Grade we decided to home school. The thought of home schooling terrified me in the beginning. The thought of having to sit with my busy body all day just seemed like more than I could handle. We spend every waking moment together as it is. The only time apart we have is school time. We don't have babysitters. I am the babysitter. This made the idea of home schooling even more unimaginable at this particular time. Don't get me wrong I am a college educated woman. I knew the course work would be a breeze. I just didn't think I had the patience to spend every single moment of my life with my child with no break away at all. No time apart to breathe.

Since my daughter is a working child actress and model I knew sooner or later home school would be a necessity. I just didn't think it would be so soon. Since the decision was looming over me I dug my heels in and began to do my research. I contacted a friend who has done it for both her kids for over ten years now. I spoke to my daughter's child therapist. I sat with my daughter's original principal from her former school. All three woman are the most knowledgable women I know about the subject. I researched schools and found that there were Catholic Home Schools out there for Catholic children. That was a huge plus. Hours of reading and talking sent me off and running into this little adventure called Home Schooling.

The first week was easy breezy. Week two not as easy as one but still ok. Week three all the way onto week six which is the week we have just completed has been a learning process to say the least. First lesson I learned was pay close attention who you leave your children with. We in trust our children with their teachers, principals and in a Catholic school setting the head priest in charge. When choosing a school I think it is real important to learn the true character of the people in charge. What are their core values. I think we parents tend to take a look at the academic aspects of a school and the extra curricular activities provided and we don't stop to look closer into who the people in charge are inside. I learned the hard way that if you leave your kids in the hands of people with low morality you are surely to find that your child will be effected in negative ways. In business and the spiritual world of self help we teach adults to pay attention to the type of people they allow in their circle and we forget to do the same for our kids.

Second and third week I learned three things, learn your child's true work ethic, learn what your child is learning in school everyday and you will learn your patience level working with your kid on a daily basis. My daughter is a perfectionist. Who knew that could happen. Who knew that the spunky little girl who can't seem to keep her room clean gets pissed off when she gets wrong answers. The kid that fights tooth and nail to not do anything she has no true confidence in, really and truly cares about the work she produces. It had been hard to tell because up until this point she didn't show any signs of caring about how her penmanship was or whether she did great work or not because she would run away from doing anything she viewed to be hard. To my surprise she hates getting answers wrong and revealed that she would get scolded when she got answers wrong while in the second grade. She wants to get every answer right and do her best. The problem children at her age have is simple, when you are in an environment that doesn't nurture these desires, as a young child you don't have the tools to motivate yourself to do it on your own. Once I explained to her that getting things wrong is apart of learning and I would never get angry with her if she was trying her best she began to make more of an effort to do her work and do her best. Her penmanship alone has improved 150%.

As we began to work I realized I didn't know what my kid knew. If it wasn't something that came home for homework I was clueless. How many of you really and truly know what your kid has learned throughout their day. You should check. You may be surprised to find that they know more or less than what you think. I found that my baby girl was taught some things backwards which made figuring out some of the basics hard. More correcting to be done on my part. That's where I learned that I have no patience for my child's antics. Society tends to make allowances for children's inappropriate behavior by telling them they are cute. My child is cute. Very cute to be exact but not nearly as cute as the world has lead her to believe. We do children such a disservice when we don't assist parents in correctly what is typical inappropriate child like behavior. The only way kids learn what's appropriate and inappropriate is we have to tell them so. Teach them the rules of society. It is perfectly ok to let your child know that it is inappropriate to interrupt to ask a question that is not relevant to the task at hand. It's not cute or funny to stall and procrastinate. I have had to learn to keep my emotions at bay in order to help my daughter keep her own anxiety of attempting to please her mother at bay. After all in the end, all our children want to do is please their parents.

The 4th Commandment! If you are religious and are teaching your children the ways of religion, in my case Catholicism, here's a helpful little trick. Teach your children the ten commandments as soon as you possibly can. What a wonderful tool. Now I know we Catholics have a way of instilling Catholic guilt into our children but I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about teaching your kids to be conscious of their behavior by using The Lords words to guide them in the right direction. When you teach a child to love God you give yourself a tool to keep your kid in line. It's like using Santa at Christmas time and the Easter Bunny during Easter. The only difference is God is year round. Why not use him to your advantage. Every God loving child wants to strive to follow God's laws. Well thankfully for all of us parents God created this beautiful law by the name of the 4th Commandment.........Honor thy father and mother. Well hey that's me. All I have to do is mention the 4th Commandment and I immediately get a, "Sorry Mommy!" It's brilliant! Children don't listen to what we tell them. Notice how you tell a kid something a million times and they don't listen but let someone else tell them the same thing and now it's like they never heard it before. Well use the Bible as the someone else. Once they read in the Bible that they have to obey you and respect you, changes happen. Their view of how things should be changes. It's a win win for everyone.

Last lesson so far. When choosing a home school make sure you have plenty of support from the school you choose. I chose a home school that is so supportive that when I wrote them an email asking them to explain the procedure on something, I received a long detailed email explaining everything step by step. Not only did I receive detailed instructions, I was given full encouragement on my progress and was told to cut myself some slack and cut back on how much I was attempting to do because ultimately I'm not on a normal time table and I don't and shouldn't feel like I need to rush anything. Take my time and enjoy the process. I couldn't get that kind of concern and encouragement at our former school and I volunteered tons of time to help out the school on a regular basis. I don't have to do volunteering for home school and I get tons of free advice and support. They get nothing from me in return. Now that is true Catholic behavior. That is how we are all taught to behave but very few of us follow that rule.

Home schooling is not for the weak. You are going to take some licks. You are going to have days where you want to pull your hair out. You will have moments of praise for yourself and praise for your child and days of feeling like you are doing things wrong. Well hell, isn't that every day of parenting? So what else is new? Here's my greatest benefit to home schooling......no matter how many bad days you may have in the beginning, there will come a day when you look up at your child after you have written 100% on a paper and feel that beautiful feeling of pride and joy that you helped your child accomplish that. You will see your child in a different light. You will appreciate that you are truly raising the type of person you want to let out into the world. There is nothing like knowing that you have full control over what your child is exposed to in this world of negativity.

I lead my child through this new adventure we are living together. We are learning and growing with every passing day. Good or bad we are trucking through our day placing 100% and A+ on a lot of papers proudly. Our adventure has only just begun. There is so much more to come. I will take you on this ride with us every step of the way.