Home School or Public School - A Difficult Decision

A lot of thought has already gone into our decision whether to home school or not. So many things to consider.

On the one hand, public school offers structured education in a social setting with other children. (Sometimes what children can learn at school, however, is not so positive. There are also issues with class size, and some of the curriculum is a bit slow for the brighter students.)

On the other hand, home school offers a personalized education in a more controlled environment. (Yet sometimes a home school environment could be too controlling or demanding, and the loss of peer social time has to be made up with clubs and other group activities.)

Overall, I expect home schooling to mean a LOT more work for us as parents. Probably much more expensive as well.

Sometimes is seems that home school is the obvious choice for our daughter, then at other times there come doubts and concerns. Pretty normal feelings for parents planning to home school.

Home Schooling Starts Before Kindergarten

More than once I've been advised to work at slowing down my daughter's rate of learning, otherwise she would be very bored when she starts school. I cannot even imagine intentionally preventing any child from learning at their own speed, especially when they are having such fun with it. Another argument for home schooling....

Katerina already knows all the uppercase and lowercase letters, and is beginning to put them together into words.

I hadn't really given her enough credit for how much she's actually learned. I was busy in the kitchen a few days ago when Katerina pulled out some magnetic letters and put them on the fridge. Next thing I know she's very proudly saying "Daddy, look! I made the."

"You made the what?" I asked her.

"No, I made the on the fridge." she answered.

I looked at the fridge and saw that she had arranged the letters "T" "H" and "E" to make the word "the".

New Blog - Home Schooling Experience

As a stay-at-home dad (working from home), much of my thoughts and efforts are on my daughter's development. This blog will be for various ideas and items of note on her growth and education. I also write www.HumanHand.com and www.InternalKungFu.ca

We've planned to home-school since Katerina was less than a year old, but still have the normal parental reservations and concerns about her missing the usual public or private school experience.

Katerina started off with baby sign language very young, and a number of educational toys. (One of her favorite toys was my computer keyboard, but I didn't mind that too much since she learned her uppercase letters at the same time.)

Katerina is 3 years and 4 months old at this time.