ARGH.
If you homeschool, you know you've been asked that question about a gazillion times, often by friends and relatives, never mind doctors, teachers, or neighbors! Kind of like the one you get when you get to three-four kids: Wow, you have your hands full! NO, REALLY? Yeah, I have two hands, and there are four kids. Good thing they have hands for each other, too!
But I digress.
I met some really neat people on our vacation. One thing I really love doing, is finding a great blog, and then looking at the sidebars and finding out about blogs they like, too! And there are SO MANY!
The family we met on our trip was on this blog. They are really neat-o! They took us to Latin Mass, which we'd never been to, and they have a great home and are so hospitable!
Jeff has this one for homesteading Catholic homeschooling families who live in Northern CA, for lack of a better description:
http://culbreath.wordpress.com/
He also had this link: http://www.homestead.org/SheriDixon/Homeschooling/HomeschoolingfortheHomesteader3.htm
And then I found this. If you have friends who are thinking about homeschooling, and they are not sure about socialization, I'd love you to pass this along. There are others, but this is a good one. I love that she's a hippy chick. We call people like her "a Broad" at our house. That is a compliment, by the way. It means a character and a half, the kind of person who just exudes personality and doesn't really give a fig what you think. I love those people.
Here is the fun part on socialization.
Chapter Four- What about Socialization???
This is the Battle Cry of the Public Schoolers. How, they ask, will a home-schooled child learn to get along with others? To share? To behave in society?
Let’s look at this a moment.
In public school, children are segregated according to age. They spend all day in the company of their peers, and maybe a year or two older or younger during recess and lunchtime. And recess and lunchtime are the only times they will have for free play and interaction all day long. The rest of the time is spent sitting still and being quiet.
When else in all of life does this occur? In your own personal workplace, are workers separated by age? At church, in our neighborhoods, ANYWHERE else in society???
I’m not saying that the answer is to keep your home-schooled children to themselves - far from it.
I am lucky enough to be a member of a small, close-knit home-school group. By lucky, I don’t mean that I was lucky enough to find A home-school group, there are many groups out there in which to belong. By lucky, I mean that this particular group is wildly diverse. We have members who are home-schooling for all the reasons listed above, and here’s the cool part - it doesn’t matter to any of us WHY we are home-schooling - we are there to support each other.
Although most of our members are Christians, some attend huge urban churches, some tiny rural family churches. We have members who have children who are autistic and/or who have attention deficit disorder and would be put in the "special ed" classes at public school - these are not mentally challenged kids, mind you, they merely think differently and need to be taught in non-mainstream ways.
I am the token quasi-heathen-reincarnationist-Old-Hippiechick, and I am embraced along with everyone else. We have members with "blended" families, members who have bi-racial families. I love our group.
In any given week there will be a number of activities to partake of: field trips, classes, community service projects, 4-H group, soccer league.
My son recently had his birthday party and I was struck yet again that it WAS simpler to have birthday parties for my public school kids - in school you know all kids in your class. Period. You don’t know their siblings or other family members. As home-schoolers we know entire families. My eight year old son had children at his party from the age of 4 months to 12 years, girls and boys, moms and dads.
It was marvelous - not a gang of same aged boys, but a huge extended family gathering.
My son can go anywhere, relate and talk to anyone, of any age, anywhere. He can go to a real restaurant, read a menu, order for himself and behave. He can go on a museum tour and ask intelligent questions. To me, this IS socialized - being comfortable and able to conduct himself in any segment of society at any given time and place.
We are so enjoying home-schooling, and it’s really been ideal for us in another way: my husband has faced some serious health challenges that have forced us to be away from home, more than not, for the last 9 months. Instead of worrying about how we will split up the family (do I leave our son with friends who will get him to school, or leave my husband alone in a hospital 5 hours from home?), we pack up the schoolwork with our clothes, and hit the museums and sights in the Big City.
If at some point, our son expresses interest in enrolling in public school, and as long as our public school remains as safe and secure as a public school can be, off he’ll go - with the understanding that once enrolled, it’s a commitment, and he must stay in school at least till the end of that school year. Again, the bottom line is encouraging the child to grow into a responsible adult and learn at his/her own pace, in his/her own manner.
The very essence of home-schooling is that we keep our children out of public school not because they will learn too MUCH about life and the world there, but because a school building cannot possibly contain all the wonders of life and the world - for that must be gotten on the fly, in the fields, museums, parks, caves, theaters, restaurants, festivals and planetariums. From the tiny organisms in the earth beneath our feet to as far as the eye can see, to Infinity and Beyond.
If my child grows up realizing that what he learns in "school" is not the sum of what he needs to know, but the foundation to learn all there is to discover....
I will have succeeded as a parent, and a teacher.
Enjoy!
