I started hom
eschooling in 1982. I didn’t know anyone else who’d done it or was doing it. I never dreamed there would ever be anything like a “ homeschooling movement”. My husband and I were following God’s leading for our kids- for our family. I started out my teaching in a pretty traditional style. I taught my kids what I’d been taught in school, following a basic curriculum to the tee. After all, I didn’t want to “ mess them up”. God opened my eyes to thinking out of the box gradually. It’s always a bit scary doing thing differently from what everyone else seems to be doing. In this case, there was no precedence set, no test results from Brian Ray or anything like that. I just had to follow what I strongly felt God was leading me to do for my kids, hoping it was the right thing. We certainly didn’t get encouragement from most other people. I think we were considered pretty weird to a lot of people, a threat to Christian schoolers (although I certainly didn’t and don’t feel that way myself). I wasn’t trying to impose what I was doing on others, just trying to follow God.
After teaching my kids for a few years with good results, I began to question the way things had “been done” to me in school, even though I was pretty good student. A Sunday school class totally changed my thinking about education. Character became my primary focus- internalizing God’s Word, taking what I learned about Scripture and applying to everyday life. This was a totally new concept to me! So exciting! I felt like a sponge when I went to class, soaking it all up. I made notes in the margin of how to teach the principles I was learning to my 1 year old son. I was still a pretty traditional thinker when it came to academics. Over years, however, I learned as I observed in my kids how they learned and how each learned differently. I’ve done things a lot differently with the last half of my kids as opposed to the first half. I’ve done things even more differently with last 4 of my kids- things I wish I’d learned earlier, but am excited to share some of these truths with you in this series of blog posts. (These are not in order of priority.)
More in this series to come next week!
~Marilyn
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