What I Wish I’d Known When I Started Homeschooling

Homeschooling Can Be Isolating

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Someone recently asked me this simple question: “What do you wish you would have known when you started homeschooling?”

It really got me thinking. You know what? 15 years later, our homeschool looks NOTHING like it did when we first started homeschooling! I was pregnant with our third child, and our oldest was attending K5 at a local private kindergarten. I had a three-year-old at home, whom I shuttled to toddler playtime each week. We had planned to look into homeschooling when first grade rolled around, but our son was having a difficult time at school, and we were both miserable. My husband said, “Let’s just do it!”, and we pulled our little guy out of school and started our journey. I had no mentors, and I didn’t know anything about homeschooling at the time, even though I was a certified English teacher.

We decided to just take it a day at a time, and our oldest son became our ‘guinea pig’!

What I wish I would have known then, and what I have since learned, is that having a support system of other homeschool moms is vital to success and happiness as a homeschool mom. Homeschooling can honestly be kind of isolating. Finding your tribe is essential to battling the loneliness you can feel as a homeschool mom, and it is also vital to helping you figure out what to do.

Having a Homeschool Support System

When we started homeschooling, I didn’t know any veteran homeschool moms to show me the ropes.

I didn’t have anyone telling me the things that I needed to hear, like:

• you can set your own schedule,
• you really can finish school for the day by lunch,
• you don’t need that super-expensive boxed curriculum,
• you can go on a nature walk and teach science,
• you can make math fun,
• you can lighten up–you’ve truthfully been homeschooling since the birth of your kids,
• God called you to this and He will equip you for it.
• your homeschool is yours and it doesn’t have to look like another’s

My friend Heather also felt the need to have someone to help her lose the public school mindset and truly embrace homeschooling. Like me, it took  years before she learned many of these lessons. YEARS that we spent stressed and missing the beauty of homeschooling. We don’t want any other homeschool family to be robbed of those years!

That is one of the major influencing factors for Heather creating the 2018 Homeschool Moms Conference. There are MANY, MANY workshops in this year’s conference that will help brand new homeschool families get on the right path from DAY ONE. The speakers have a combined total of over 600 years of homeschooling experience.

Workshops include:

• Getting Out of the Public School Mindset
• Successful Transitions: from public school to high school
• Homeschool Planning for the Unorganized Mom
• 3 Most Important Things I Learned in 31 Years of Homeschooling
• How to Homeschool With Lots of Littles to Entertain
• Balancing Homeschooling and Life
• Do’s and Don’ts of Successful Homeschooling
• What’s Your Child’s Learning & Thinking Style
• Homeschooling on a Shoestring Budget
• Choosing the Right Curriculum
• MANY workshops on the various homeschool methods: Charlotte Mason, Unit Studies, Classical, Unschooling, etc.
• MANY workshops on homeschooling children with special needs
• MANY workshops on homeschooling high school and preparing for college
• MANY workshops on homeschooling preschoolers
• and MANY more {over 100 workshops in the homeschool track!}

Working From Home While Homeschooling