Homeschool Diaries

Homeschooling is messy in real life. I didn't have one single moment of epiphany and seamlessly withdraw my children from school. Homeschooling seemed scary. We found mentors, local groups and still went through months of research, late night conversations and soul searching before we decided to take the plunge.

Starting in May of 2014, we set out on a brand new adventure of homeschooling! After our decision in February of 2014, support flooded in from many directions, but I'd like to extend a special thank you for encouragement from Heidi Strawser. She answered questions with good humor, shared her experience and generally was awesome!

Our big public announcement (along with my thoughts on why we decided to homeschool) came in May. Then finally came the surreal day when we forgot chose not to go back to school. That first month out of school reminded felt a bit like becoming a minor celebrity; I never knew how many of the parents in our private school were curious about homeschooling until I shared that blog post on my personal Facebook page. I think there are only two things you need to know to rock a brand new homeschool. Need a little more detail? Here are my best tips for surviving the first week of homeschool (some of which I totally ignored) and 20 lessons learned in our first 40 days of homeschool. To see how all of those tips fit into a real life day, follow along a for a day in our homeschool.We loved our first year with Sonlight Core B for history and literature and Horizons for math and plan to continue with both Core C and Horizons.

Our next homeschool adventure involved packing up the kids all by myself. We flew off to Disney's Student Seminars to celebrate our first year of homeschool with our adventures as The Three Mousekateers! The kids didn't know that we were going to Walt Disney World, just that there was a homeschool seminar in Orlando. If they knew, they'd explode in little piles of pixie dust. I told them well after Christmas.

This year, we've browsed our way through a fairly varied summer reading list and found a lot of fun, educational activities to keep the kids out of the heat and rain but not without plenty of free time. For a bit of fun, I even put together a scope and sequence for playing classical video games.

The best way to follow along with my homeschool adventures is the tag Homeschool Diaries and my homeschool Pinterest page, Adventure is Out There!