Friday July 26, 2024

I dropped off the DOE form 4140 to the kids’ school today and now it all is official - I am homeschooling my kids this year!

I have to admit that for the longest time I have been saying I’m going to homeschool, but I was keeping one foot in the public school door. A few weeks ago I got an email to bring in my son for Kindergarten testing and I knew I had to make a decision. I procrastinated until the last day before the testing because I was still unsure and then I went for it! I bought a homeschool course, printed out the homeschool form, filled it out, and dropped it off.

As I walked back to my car I felt free and excited for this new adventure with my children.

So why do I even want to homeschool my kids? (I get asked this a lot) While I’m sure there will be lots of opportunities to dive into each reason in greater detail I wanted to start with listing them for you here:

1. I’m lucky enough that I can! Since I run the business from home with my husband, I have the option to even try homeschool while still working.
2. Every time the kids are in school their behavior really takes a dive for the worse. I don’t blame the staff or teachers, I blame the parents of the other children. I have been around enough kids and parents to know that the standards for parenting are quite open ended these days.
3. I want to spend more quality time with my kids. Quality time for me isn’t helping them to develop their interests and overcome their challenges. What a great foundation for building a homeschool curriculum!
4. We can’t afford to send my kids to a private school.
5. In today’s world I worry about the safety of my kids at school.
6. I don’t want my kids to learn about what is right and wrong from a school. They will learn from us and from the people in our lives we trust to be around us.
7. I think I can maximize my time and my kids’ time because I can tailor our schedules to be what’s best for us.
8. When we get more money I would love to travel to parts of the world (mostly Polynesia) with my kids and give them life experiences.
9. I want to strengthen the Hawaiian language in our home which starts with me.
   
10. I want the kids to spend more time doing extra curricular activities.
11. I'm tired of my kids getting sick all the time from school.

There are probably 10 more reasons, but these are the ones I most commonly cite and like I said, you can be sure to hear more about each of them in the coming months!

Have you considered homeschooling your kids? What reasons do you have?