God leads each of us differently. For me, I've always felt like I just sort of, you know, "end up" someplace. I don't hear God's tell me to do this or that thing but, over time, I often realize that this -- whatever "this" is -- is exactly what I'm supposed to do. I know it. I can look around and see that, despite feeling like I was wandering aimlessly for a while, God was moving me here, like the brilliant chess moves my brother would pull on me if I still allowed him to beat me at chess. I don't like losing, so we never play anymore.
Others experience a much more solid direction from God. However that works, they know they were told to do something, so they do it. God's leading for them is precise and exact.
This Way
So how did you end up in this crazy-awesome world of homeschooling? How did God nudge you to spend your time this way? Why did you start homeschooling?
~Luke Holzmann
Filmmaker, Writer, Guardian
We outlined our full reasons here: http://littleshininglights.wordpress.com/about/why-we-homeschool/, but to summarize, because we really felt it was the best choice for our son given our circumstances. Our neighborhood school did not seem like a good fit - he is pretty academically advanced but about half the kids coming into the school do not speak English and we were concerned about the quality of academic instruction he would receive there. Homeschooling did seem like a good fit - and to be honest, Sonlight is a big part of the reason I homeschool. I don't look at other catalogs, I don't worry about other curricula. They are fun to look at but I am amazed at what a good fit Sonlight has been and how well it works for us, how smoothly nearly every day goes, and how much I am able to add of "other things" I like him/us to do (critical thinking, etc etc) from other resources. We may not always homeschool, but I wish we could just buy a Sonlight Core every year and use it anyway! :) (Um, Sonlight is not paying me to say this. ;) It really just has been awesome - this is our first year officially HS-ing - DS is in Kindergarten).
I started homeschooling for reasons I felt at the time were selfish: we had waited a long time for our son, and I just wasn't ready to send him away for several hours a day when he was 3, or 4, or 5... In our state, compulsory education doesn't begin until age 7, so I decided to try homeschool kindergarten. How hard could it be? And I wasn't breaking any laws. :-) We had a blast, so the next year we decided to homeschool 1st grade. He still wasn't 7, and he'd already learned to read, so again, I figured what was the harm? We are now in our 5th year of Sonlight, and I think we're in it for the long haul! I love homeschooling for so many reasons that never would have occurred to me before I got into it. I'm so thankful God let me stumble onto this great treasure, and thankful for the friend who recommended Sonlight all those years ago.
I often feel like a bit of an anomaly around other homeschoolers: I never planned to homeschool my kids. Actually, I really didn't want to do it and didn't think I had it in me. But despite the fact that our local public school was a very good one, it didn't work for us. It's kind of a long story. If you'd like to read the whole thing, I posted it on my blog a while back: http://cockingfamily.com/blog/2013/03/20/the-reluctant-homeschoole/
By the way, we started using Sonlight right off the bat when we pulled them out of school and never looked back. We started with Core K and are now on F. :)