Judy Wilken
When you decide to homeschool your own, you don’t know it but you have just decided to gift yourself in the process. I can’t think of another opportunity in life that demands this degree of giving. There is no other gift more valuable than giving your time, energy and a love for learning to your own child. There were numerous reasons my husband and I decided to give this gift to our girls. We loved to learn and wanted that love to grow in each of our children from the moment they began ‘school’. We loved to take time with ideas, mull them over, get to know them for themselves. To us, ideas were treasures if you allowed yourself to treat them as such.
As the years go on I have realized another reason I wanted to homeschool my girls. And this reason is probably the strongest one. I wanted to watch my girls learn. I wanted to be privy to how they learn; what their style of learning is; what path they choose to grasp a new concept. These are the things I would never get to know if they were in a classroom with twenty or so other children. Another important reason for homeschooling my girls was I wanted them to be safe. It bothered me deeply when I thought of them at a traditional school where there might be drugs, weapons, ‘clicks’ of girls, such real dangers around them. Just the idea that I would not know how they were treated or who was speaking to them made me feel uncomfortable. I would not know if someone told them something that is not true. And this concerned me greatly.
Back in the early eighties when we began homeschooling our daughters there was no Internet to interact with, no organization at the local or state level that sanctioned homeschooling as an acceptable method of educating a child. There were a few stores in the community that sold teaching materials but very little was available for teaching hands-on science. But, as the saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention. Once we decided to homeschool we never thought of turning back. I immediately began putting together lessons in math, literature, art, writing, telling stories and music. I began buying science tools, such as compasses, prisms, motors, circuit components, etc from science wholesale houses I had learned about in college. Within three months, when Reason was four and Serene was three years old, I had a somewhat structured program for them and felt comfortable with it.
As the girls fell into a rhythm with me, word got around and soon other homeschooling mothers were calling, asking me to teach their child my science, music, art, math. I obliged at first, feeling flattered they wanted what I had created. But soon our classes became too big. It seemed my initial reasons for homeschooling my girls were not being fulfilled. I wanted very much to watch my girls learn and had to face the fact that that was not possible with classes of four or more students. I quickly realized I had to seek other teachers to teach the other subjects. I hired a wonderful elementary school teacher who carried on with my work in literature and math. I hired an artist who dove into my art program with gusto. The music teacher was the most difficult to find. I ended up hiring several music ‘teachers’ who introduced drums, rhythm to our class on Friday mornings after we had our art. As time went on, I realized I had created a school and was delighted with this.
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