Back to Home Schooling

After a few well-placed and well-timed (IMO) political posts, I am now off the topic until some other boneheaded idea surfaces. ( can you say national healthcare?)

Back on the home education front!

We did not begin with home schooling. Both of my kids attended Catholic school where we were able to actually PAY MONEY for the school abuse! How lucky for us! Once I was no longer afraid to home school my kids, (why oh why was I afraid?) my kids actually came to me and asked! My daughter was 13 and had just finished 7th grade and my son was 10 finishing 4th. We started out with a loose set of curricula and we made special time for "school" etc. After a couple of weeks my son said to me, "I thought it would be more fun." I'm sure the noise you all heard in September of 1998 was my large bubble bursting! During this time I became very involved with the AOL home schooling chat community. Oh how I do miss so many of my old Homefront Hall buddies! We have a chat on Friday nights through the A to Z homeschool website here:

http://homeschooling.gomilpitas.com/extras/A2Zchat.htm

But it is just not the same. Some nights the AOL chat room would have 20 people in there all talking about home schooling and asking questions. The good old days! Some of the chat hosts were really great to me, actually all of them were, and I did receive the virtual smack upside the head for being so uptight about it. Everyone said, "relax!" It took me a little while but I did relax and turned towards unschooling. My kids obviously did just fine as they are both quite well educated. Go me! LOL Frankly it was not ME, it was the kids themselves deciding that they did not want to be uneducated. Nothing like chatting in IM or in a computer game to make a kid brush up on his spelling so he didn't look dumb. And who says the computer is not educational!?