Hi! I am a homeschool mom of one child. My daughter is currently 4.9 years old and we started kindergarten this week! I have no other children and although I would welcome more it looks like our life will be complete with our one.
So why homeschool if I only have one kid? Why not? Should only families of 2, 3, 5, 19 kids homeschool? No I have the right also and this is what we think is best for our child.
How did we come to this decision? A few things added up to wanting to homeschool. First her birthday is 19 days after the cut off for getting into the state schools and most private schools follow that same cut off. Second I found a group/program I fell in love with and can't imagine my child learning any other way or with any other curriculum. Some might say I am a control freak (which I will admit I am a little). I can't see anyone else being able to teach my child better than me. So here we are homeschooling one.
Our choices for curriculum this year are simple! The group/program I fell in love with is Classical Conversations (CC). So we will take from what we do with them for our History and Science and Latin. I decided to go with the CC recommended Math which is Saxon Math, and so far so good. I did get the recommendation that if my daughter already knows her numbers and can count to skip the K curriculum and go ahead with 1st grade. I am so glad for this because 5 days into the curriculum and my daughter knows more than they expected her to so it's real fun and easy for her. Next I wanted a phonics program, and I stumbled upon All About Spelling. No it's not really a total phonics reading curriculum, but they do go through phonics to teach the spelling. They also have books for the kids to read and I believe are coming out with an All About Reading curriculum. I am also doing Handwriting Without Tears with her. I was fortunate enough for someone else to pay for me to attend a HWT workshop and so I have allot of the materials and we use that for our handwriting. That rounds out our official curriculum choices. In addition to those we are reading each day from her Bob book sets, and I will continue to find readers at her level.
We had a daily schedule from 8am-7pm with each hour having an activity. Few if any of the activities take a full hour so it's not as crazy as it sounds. We start the day looking at the schedule and deciding what we will do and when we will do it. Some things like Math, Spelling, Reading, and when we start CC our Memory Work are the no choice do every day things. We then have chores and an elective which we pick from each day. Last she has some fun choices to add to the blank spots.
I actually had the intention of starting about 3 weeks ago (and we did with our Math) and adding something to our schedule each week. Two kinks happened, first I didn't order my All About Spelling in time to get it for our 2nd week. Then one of my husband's Aunt's died suddenly and we drove 12 hours to be with family. When we returned I took a week off doing other stuff that wasn't done while we were out of town. Then the public schools were starting and so I got in gear and decided to start also this past Monday. We used our regular schedule on Monday and Tuesday then Wednesday we took the day off so I could teach the teachers at her former school about Handwriting Without Tears. Thursday (today) we were back on our schedule. Tomorrow we have our CC Orientation. So first week of school was only 3 days. I love it!!
Congratulations on starting your home schooling adventure. I think it is great that you are choosing to homeschool your child. My brother and I were homeschooled and loved it, even though we were a small homeschooling family compared to most we knew.
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