How it all started

We started our home school journey about 3 1/2 years ago. At first Mr. Incredible was not very keen on the idea. Mostly because he likes to save the day and Elastigirl was about to meet the biggest stretching of her life. Our first experience was a virtual public school. I guess you could arguing that wasn't home school but we were home and doing school so that's what I call it. I started off with just Violet (4th) and Edith (2nd). One thing that might make more sense going forward is knowing that we are a his, hers and ours household. Dash spent the middle of 1st grade tell just recently living with his dad. Life happened & in the middle of 12th grade he moved in with us. Strangely enough he was my first experience with homeschooling. I homeschooled him for the first part of 1st grade. There was not as much resources and support back then and we had so much happened in that year that I gave up. This is the other reason Mr. Incredible was a little leery of me giving it another try and another reason why I gave it a year commitment, to give it a true go, before deciding whether to continue or not. Back to that in a minute. Margo lives with her mom and is about to start high school. My oldest two do public school and it works for them. When we talk about homeschooling you will mostly hear about Violet, Edith, Agnes and Jack-Jack. They are here with me everyday running this race. So back to the beginning. Our first year sucked. I'm not going to lie, homeschooling is not for the faint of heart. You don't do it because your lazy. It's work. My reasons,there are many ...my kids needed me to nurture them- Contrary to popular belief sending your kids to school to build structure and character does not work. No one can build their character better then a God led parent. ...they needed instruction- I got very tired of my kids coming home and asking me for help with their homework and there was no instruction as to what they were suppose to be doing. ...they needed Godly influence- Now just to clarify I don't believe that my kids can only hang out with Christians but I do believe that they should have supervised visits with those who don't know Him. Actually, really my kids are supervised most always...Christian or not. I don't need to have my kids coming home filled with garbage. Some of my first year of school was just helping them filter some of the bad they have seen. I was surprised how much they had to see and deal with at such a young age just by going to school. If I could give a word of advice to those considering taking this journey. Don't worry to much about academic your first year. Part of why mine was so hard was I was virtually public schooling them. Basically I was being asked teach like they do in a Brick and Mortar in my home. It doesn't work...especially with multiple children. If I could do it again I would have spent my year just getting to know my kids and their likes and ways they learn. I would have spent less time worrying about getting everything done in someone else's window and instead worked on creating a window that worked for us. Take time, breathe, set a time to finish, don't go over it. Take breaks. Take a day if you need to. Go to the park. Read books. Watch some videos and just figure out how your kids learn. Also don't kill your pocket book buying curriculum. So many people do this and find it doesn't work for their kids or it doesn't work for them. My goal with this blog is to post any of the things I use that are free or close enough to help you. This week we will start with the one I started with when I left the virtual school and started fully homeschooling. This for many is a full curriculum, as it was for us our first year schooling. Now I use it more as a guide as I'm trying to use the computer less and less for our education. Enjoy. Easy Peasy