Why Homeschool High School? Part 1 - Success

What is "success" as we raise and provide educations for our sons and daughters?  Is it getting into a top college?  Is it getting into college, period?  Is it getting a good job?  Is it the generic "be happy?"  Or is it perhaps something more?  For our family, we define success is quite simply the process of discovering, nurturing, and fulfilling one's calling in life.  What's more, we believe that God is personally involved in the process, so this is more than a school decision, it is a lifestyle decision.  We as a family have adopted this as our family's Mission Statement:

Ryan's kindergarten 1st day, September, 2003

Together we discover, nurture, and fulfill God's call on our lives.

Ryan's 8th grade 1st day, August, 2011

Homeschooling, particularly through high school, is part of a whole family life approach, one part of our family's four core values and strategies:

• Authentic worship
• Loving relationships
• Worthwhile learning
• Excellent life experiences

As many homeschooling families know, the curriculum, reading, math, and unit studies are only the beginning in educating our families at home.  It is a holistic lifestyle.  How many days a year are classes in session?  180?  365, really.  Therefore, we homeschool because the benefits affect every area of each of our lives - worship, relationships, learning, and life experiences.  Accordingly, continuing the benefits of homeschool through high school is a logical conclusion.

But back to the success question.  Success could include college and good jobs (whatever that means).  Parents can have expectations and conclusions about their kids' talents and abilities, but those talents and abilities can take us (all of us, regardless of age) to unexpected places.  Success may not include college or the prestigious job, it really depends upon God's providence.  What better setting to help our soon to be adults navigate this providence than with their parents?

To conclude this post about success, then, our family chooses to homeschool through high school because it helps our kids have the best chance of authentic success in the whole of life.  The next posts will explore each of our family's core values in more depth and how they relate to homeschooling and high school homeschooling.  May this series, and this blog, help encourage you to finish the course.

Part 2 - Priorities

Best regards,
Jeff

Homeschool Highschool Begins

Curriculum for the 2012 - 2013 homeschool year is now arriving!  Today we received boxes from both Sonlight Curriculum and Christian Book Distributors.  True, most of this first wave of books are for our 5th grade son and 7th grade daughter, but Exploring Creation with Biology from Apologia Science also came, so the high school material is coming!  That is, unless we count Algebra from Math-U-See, but Ryan is already working through his Algebra in 8th grade.

In April, according to our Alpha Omega catalog, AOP products will be 20% off!  We will be adding History & Geography and Language Arts.

As you probably noticed, we draw from several different sources in building our homeschool curriculum, not only high school, but also middle school and upper elementary school.  We have been homeschooling since Ryan was pre-kindergarten, and the ups and downs of that experience is helping us as we plan for the upcoming year.

There is more to high school homeschooling than buying the right curriculum, though.  There is recordkeeping, character building, accountability, and more that I'm sure we will think of.  Future posts will address these and more.