Thankful Thursday – April 16, 2009

Today, I am most thankful for . . . Homeschooling!!

Some kids do really well in school – I was one.  Some families aren’t able to homeschool and others simply are called by God to be ministers in the school systems.  I am happy, though, that God has called us to homeschool.

Wild Man is finally reading “real” books (he has dyslexia and is almost 11 years old).  Mr. Math Tutor and I were talking this morning about how it is entirely possible that Wild Man might never have learned to read well if he was in school.  He is smart enough that he might have gotten by well enough to not have been “labeled” and gotten the help he needed.  He would have been at severe risk of getting frustrated and being diagnosed as being "lazy”.

It hasn’t been an easy three years, but Wild Man is now reading everything he can get his hands on.  He has read four books in less than two weeks.  He wanted to read Around the World in Eighty Days yesterday, but decided to go with something easier after he read the first paragraph!  (But, he tried!)  I got him some books from the Young Adult section of the library this afternoon and he’s already well into one of them.  I truly have been thanking God hourly for the last week for the gift of being able to teach this boy at home.

Ga’hoole Girl doesn’t have learning challenges like her brother, but she definitely prefers learning at home.  She and her piano teacher chose some wickedly hard pieces for recital and festival this year.  Since she’s at home and gets to make her own schedule (within reason!), she has been practicing for well over an hour a day for the last couple of weeks.

I could go on and on with the reasons that home education works for us, but I’ll just leave it at this: God has given our family a real gift by allowing us to live in a country and state where we can homeschool with minimal difficulty and giving us the resources to pull it off.

What are you thankful for?  Check out Thankful Thursday to see what others are saying.