Homeschooling Overview

This is a very general overview of what homeschooling is and how we have approached it in our family. In short, homeschooling is the education of children at home rather than at a school. In years past, most children were homeschooled because of the religious beliefs of their parents. Things have now changed a bit and, like many families, we started homeschooling because of dissatisfaction with the public school learning environment.You can give your children the advantage of homeschooling also! Homeschooling allows for so many different learning styles and environments, children usually become eager learners. You have the capabilities to do it. I am the father of 2 girls and a boy and I homeschooled all 3 with a remarkable degree of success.

A few years ago, The Associated Press reported that homeschooled children are more likely than other students to live with two or more siblings in a two-parent family, with one parent working outside the home. Parents of homeschoolers are, on average, better educated than other parents, (a greater percentage have college degrees), though their incomes are about the same. Like most parents, the vast majority of those who homeschool their children earn less than $50,000 and many earn less than $25,000.

Homeschooled children sometimes use a commercial curriculum from companies like A Beka or Saxon Publishers. There are also correspondence schools and on-line schools that some families use. We have used both Saxon and Abeka books along with several other publishers. As I was quite confident right from the start about our ability to be successful, the approach I took was probably less structured than most.

Academic performance and socialization are two points that are frequently questioned by people who are skeptical of homeschooling. In general, homeschooled students significantly outperform public schooled children on standardized tests and are much better socialized than their public school educated peers. Wow! What did he say? An assertion like this often gets questioned by some, but I have lots of personal experience and research to back this up that I will discuss in future posts.