Although I was open to homeschooling, I never expected to start it last year! For the 2019-2020 school year, my oldest daughter and my son attended a Catholic school that we could walk to. My daughter was in grade 1 and my son Joshua was in kindergarten. We loved the school and the teachers, and I was glad my kids were attending there.
However, in January 2020, it became clear that my son was not thriving at this school. It was a fight every morning to get him to go, and some mornings I just kept him home because it was too stressful. He would come home after 2.5 hours at kindergarten and be completely stressed out. He was angry, he would have meltdowns, and I couldn’t take him anywhere without him getting upset. His teacher was concerned that he was behind academically, but I couldn’t practice anything at home with him because it made him so upset.
When schools closed in March 2020, he was thrilled! Online school was quite challenging so I began to think that homeschooling would be a better option. Due to some other personal circumstances as well, we decided to try homeschooling for one year.
So in September 2020, we began our homeschooling journey! I quickly realized the more I could give Joshua to do that did not involve holding a pencil the better he did. I added in the Reading Eggs app as part of our lessons, and he loved it!
Joshua’s learning just skyrocketed! He went from not knowing the whole alphabet to reading in just a few months! He went from not being able to write his numbers to doing addition and subtraction! He began to enjoy learning more and turned back into the child I knew. The anger and meltdowns are gone. He laughs and has fun all day and even enjoys drawing sometimes now. I realized the classroom simply was not a good fit for him, but homeschooling is exactly right!
Written by Rachel Elyas
Rachel is a wife and mom of 4 kids. She has her own health and wellness business she runs from home as well as homeschooling her oldest two kids. Having lived overseas, she loves other cultures, languages and is passionate about everyone having the Bible in their own language. She loves going to the lake with her family and reading a good book. You can find her on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/rachel_doinglifetogether/.
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"Train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old, he will not depart from it" (Proverbs 22:6).