I will preface this by saying that while I never actually had my own public school classroom, my time as a short-term and long-term substitute teacher, and while pursuing a full-time teaching position, I had many biases in place regarding homeschooling. I spent the first year struggling in our homeschool because my public-school background clouded my education and understanding of learning. By our third year in (and consequentially the year I chose to test out Sonlight), I had a mind shift and finally had the clarity to separate myself from my public-school mindset. While I still have valuable lessons from my college days and my days as a substitute teacher, I now view our homeschool as something completely different, as others should consider it.
While I had a teaching background, I felt ill-prepared for teaching my child. I went to school to teach middle school and high schoolers, who by the time they reached my classroom, would have already learned to read and write and then some. I knew the mechanics of language and reading, but no way could I teach my child to read, and oh dear heaven, I was going to have to teach her math too. Many people are quick to assume that I knew what I was doing because of my teaching background. It is not the same, not one bit. I was so terrified. I researched until I was blue in the face, and those first few years, I was a mess. As we have moved on, I have gained more confidence in myself, and as each year progresses, I fall more in love with homeschooling.
In the early years (even our first year with Sonlight), I felt that we had to do everything. By everything I mean, we had to do all the social things, co-op, volunteering, and additional lessons. We also needed to learn Montessori setups, sight words and reading, picture-perfect crafts, and spot-on experiments. You name it, and I probably tried it at some point in our homeschooling journey. I had this sense of urgency that we needed to learn it all right now. When someone would ask (or quiz) my daughter on things, I would cringe, hoping she would remember it or knew it by osmosis. I had both a fear of missing out and a fear of failure and the judgment of others.
Every time I tell someone we homeschool, socialization comes up. I have learned that as much as people excite about socialization and homeschoolers, they do not know what socialization is. Socialization is the ability to interact with different ages, races, religions, nationalities, and anyone else in between. For as much as I am an introvert, my daughters are not. They constantly amaze me at their abilities to converse with any group.
Teaching our daughters has taught me that a cookie-cutter template cannot teach a child. Just because every third grader in our local school district is doing X, Y, Z doesn’t mean that my daughters also need to be learning when they are the same age. I am a rebel in this regard. I advocate for learning at the child’s pace, and homeschooling is an excellent avenue to pursue this. An example is an emphasis on learning grammar and writing in the younger years. She hated coming up with sentences and thinking on her own and would get so frustrated with me. While I guinea pigged on my oldest daughter for the first few years, trying to include this, by year three, I had abandoned a massive Language Arts heavy program in favor of following her lead better. We began strictly focusing on learning to read, and we left formal writing instruction in favor of copy work and spelling only. It was not worth it. Once she learned to read well and finished the reading program I had chosen, we then picked up grammar and writing. While we did it slowly, she is running with it now and is even pursuing writing a lot on her own time.
Once I had my realization of what homeschooling was, I stripped down our schedule and re-prioritized our days. I shifted out the school year to year-round schooling, eliminating the pressure I felt on myself. I stopped pushing for everything the public school was doing and looked at my daughters (because at this point, I was now homeschooling two kiddos instead of just one). My daughters taught me that they were indeed learning, and we did not need to do it all; instead, I needed to engage and enrich their strengths and foster their weaknesses to turn them into strengths.
My love for reading and history attracted me to use Sonlight. A lot of these lessons I have learned after letting go of my teacher planning brain and allowed Sonlight to take over the planning for me. When I made the shift to Sonlight, I finally allowed myself to relax in our homeschooling journey. Reflecting on the last few years, I realize I have learned a lot along our homeschooling journey. These lessons have taught me to be a better Momma and a better teacher.