I’ve got a boy going on 6 in August. I want to home-school 100%, but I work full time and my wife is not confident she can teach him.
Any ideas?
Can I teach him after work? Can I somehow instill confidence in my wife that she can do it? Another problem is that English is her second language.
I’m in AZ btw. I’ve read the laws, and I know only a parent can teach when homeschooling.
I am very sad when I read or hear the above. Why?
Answer: This lack of confidence is **entirely** due to the indoctrination that Americans have received while attending their own K-12, prison-like, and brick and mortar schools. Of course brick and mortar schools want their graduates to believe that only such institutions can teach children. It is how they perpetuate their evil!
Of course your wife is capable of teaching your children! She taught them to speak in English, toilet trained him, how to eat with spoon and fork, ride a bike, roller skate, tie their shoes, say please and thank you, dress themselves ...etc. None of this is learned in **school**!
Believe me teaching a child to read and do arithmetic is NOT any different than any of the **thousands** of things she has already taught your children.
Please visit a homeschooling meeting with your wife so you can both see that ordinary people are rearing up extraordinary children by doing what God has naturally planned for us to do.
Do it. It will be the best thing you ever did for your children.
Remember...there is a lot of help out there.
Tell your wife that my wife did it, and she Is about as temperamentally unfit as you can get. She isn’t very patient, and has a short fuse, if you sense my meaning. And she isn’t big on academics.
One child made it all the way through, and will be going off to college with a couple of small scholarships. The other child has some minor learning disabilities, and over my objections, my wife put her in our local government school this year. The experience has been almost uniformly negative.
Keep in mind, too, that after about age 9, the kids can work out of the planner, pretty much on their own, except for maybe math and essay-writing.
No, you won’t be able to teach him after work.
I don’t know what concrete doubts your wife has about homeschooling. If I knew, I might be able to get you information that will help her.
She has to make it her life project and you have to help. Being a homeschooling family is a creative lifestyle; different from the herd.
She will learn as she goes.
I was very intimidated about whether or not I could homeschool myself, and I have a college degree. (not in education)
Chances are, you two have already been homeschooling all along without even really realizing it. The instruction does not have to be formal classroom kind of instruction and it does not take hours a day. At his age, he’s learning to read and write and calculate and I’ll bet you’ve been helping him along so far.
You should find a homescool support group in your area. They will be able to give you good advice on curriculum and give you a lot of encouragement. Also, although the state laws vary about who gives the actual instruction, as far as I know, there is nothing that says that the parent HAS to do all the instruction by himself/herself. For example, we hired out most of the music in piano lessons and the kids were on the local Y swim team, which took care of most of PE.
You ought to join HSLDA, Home School Legal Defense Association. Here’s a link to their website:
People have overcome greater obstacles to homeschooling than the one’s you’re facing and I doubt there are many people who start out homeschooling confident that they can. Perhaps that newer generation who was raised homeschooling themselves and are now second generation homeschoolers. The rest of us, however, went through the same thing you are.
She can do it! Attending a conference will boost her confidence considerably. It’s what convinced me.
As others have said, join up with homeschooling groups in your area - they are all over the place. Just make sure you’re joining a Christian homeschooling group and not some granola/communist group.
Also, join not just the HSLDA, but Heritage Defense as well.
I am a single parent; successfully homeschooled both of my kids.
They have been doing "school in a box" longer then anyone. For someone who is a bit uncertain the comfort of knowing that she will get everything she needs in a package might help give her the push she needs.
After a year if she finds it beyond her abilities then you can try something else.
She can do it!
Regards,