Getting Started in Homeschooling, with Israel Wayne

Few subjects bring so much fear and uncertainty to parents as the thought of pulling their kids out of school and homeschooling them. While there are a wealth of fantastic resources available and a thriving homeschool movement across the country, until families take the leap into homeschooling there are always going to be unknowns and the nagging thoughts of “am I able”, “am I enough”, “will my kids get a good education”, “will my kids be able to get into college”, and the ever-present “what about socialization.”

Even if your kids haven’t started school yet and you are just considering homeschooling your preschooler or kindergartener, many of those same questions and doubts persist, and too many times this is compounded by the objections of friends and family members.

Here’s the good news. You can do this! Literally MILLIONS of students are being homeschooled right now. Not only have Millions been homeschooled since the rise of modern homeschooling, many more have been homeschooled throughout history, as “traditional school” has only been the standard for the past 150 years or so.

There’s even more good news. Not only can you do this, but it will be good for your children. Homeschooled students are thriving. Decades of research is now proving that homeschooled students are, on the whole, better prepared for college and life than their public and private schooled peers. Here are just a few links to back up these claims:

https://www.nheri.org/research/research-facts-on-homeschooling.html

https://secure-media.collegeboard.org/digitalServices/pdf/sat/TotalGroup-2014.pdf

http://www.nbcnews.com/feature/college-game-plan/colleges-welcome-growing-number-homeschooled-students-n520126

http://newsonrelevantscience.blogspot.com/2011/09/httpwwwonlinecollegeorg2011091315-key.html

If you, or someone you know, is considering homeschooling we encourage you to attend the Homegrown Generation Family Expo. We have gathered an amazing group of speakers together for a week of homeschooling encouragement and practical advice. The online conference will be LIVE and INTERACTIVE from February 17th through the 21st and registration includes lifetime access to the videos, notes, and a virtual swag bag full of valuable resources. Lifetime registration is just $20 here.

Homegrown Generation Family Expo - Online Homeschool Conference

Homeschooling is good for students, good for families, and good for culture, so it is our mission to encourage and equip homeschooling families to start well and finish strong.

Yvette Hampton recently talked with author and speaker, Israel Wayne about how to start homeschooling – how to do it well – and how to make it to graduation and beyond! Israel Wayne is the author of Answers for Homeschooling: Top 25 Questions Critics Ask, which answers many of the questions that people have when considering whether homeschooling is appropriate for their family. In this conversation, Israel and Yvette discuss why so many families choose to homeschool and how the alternatives (public school, and private school) are really doing. They also discuss whether homeschooling is appropriate for all types of families, or if it is best suited to certain groups.

They also discussed what steps a family should take when they want to start homeschooling and what really matters once they start, whether it’s curriculum choices, educational methods, scheduling, organization, life skills, relationships, or discipleship. Finally, Israel gives helpful insights for dads in leading their families in instruction and discipleship.

Enjoy their conversation

Yvette Hampton:           Hey, everyone, this is Yvette Hampton. Welcome back to The Schoolhouse Rocked Podcast. I have a return guest on with me today, and he is one of my absolute favorite homeschool people, one of my favorite guests that we’ve ever had on the podcast. As a matter of fact, Israel, I think that your podcast, I don’t think, I know that your podcast interview that I did with you quite some time ago is one of the most listened to that we’ve ever done. I am so excited to have you back on. Israel Wayne, welcome to the podcast again.

Israel Wayne:                Hey, it’s great to be back with you. Thank you so much.

Yvette Hampton:           Thank you. Thank you. You are such a blessing to us. We have really enjoyed getting to know you, Garritt and I. We’re excited, because you’re going to be part of the Homegrown Generation Family Expo that we have coming up February 17th through the 21st. It’s so funny, because people keep looking at the list of speakers that we have at our speaker lineup and just going “Oh my goodness, this is amazing, you have the best of the best of the homeschool heroes.” And I don’t say that to puff you up. I say that because you have truly had a huge impact in not only my life, but I know the lives of thousands and thousands of families. We are very honored. It is only by the grace of God that we have the speakers that we have for this event, and you are one of them that from the very beginning we said, “We’ve got to get Israel as a speaker for this event.” So thank you for joining us for that in a few weeks, and thank you for being with me again on the podcast today.

Israel Wayne:                Absolutely.

Yvette Hampton:           Tell us very quickly about your family, because you’ve got a couple of kids and a wife who you really like.

Israel Wayne:                Yes, absolutely. Well, my homeschool journey actually started when I was a child. My family began homeschooling in 1978, which is like what, 42 years ago now? I’ve been in it my whole life, and was homeschooled all the way through high school, met my wife, who was homeschooled. Her family started homeschooling in 1983. Both of our families were pioneer homeschooling families. My mother founded and published the Home School Digest magazine since 1988, so I kind of grew up in the leadership side of homeschooling as well. So when my wife and I got married, being that we were homeschooled pretty much our whole way through, it was a foregone conclusion for us that we would homeschool our children. Lord has so far blessed us with 10 children. The oldest is 19, and the youngest has just turned a year. We have 10 children sandwiched in there between 19 and 10. Our oldest is working full-time. We have a daughter that just turned 18, a son that turned 16, I’m taking him to driver’s ed here later today.

Yvette Hampton:           Oh no! Wow!

Israel Wayne:                It’s one of those things. We actually have four teenagers living in our home right now, and then some little ones too. So we’re kind of hitting it on all cylinders, all sides of the parenting spectrum, we’re deeply entrenched in now, the parenting scene and the homeschooling world as well. Now, I speak at conferences and write books on homeschooling as well.

Yvette Hampton:           Yeah, that’s awesome, and you don’t write books just on homeschooling, you write books on family, on parenting and things like that as well. So, that is exciting. We’re doing a series right now on getting started homeschooling. This time of the year is that time where, as you know, because you’ve been in homeschooling for quite a long time, it’s that time of year where you kind of get into that slump. A lot of moms, they’re thinking through “Okay, why am I doing this? Am I going to do this again next year? What does our family look like?”, and reevaluating their decision to homeschool. Many of them are sold out on homeschooling and they wouldn’t do anything different, but they’re still having to think through what the rest of this year and next year is going to look like for them. Then you’ve got that kind of group of parents who are starting to think … There’s something about the holidays where we come into the new year and we start thinking “What are we going to do next year for our kids and for their education?”

Yvette Hampton:           We’ve got that group of parents too who are just saying “What are we going to do? How are we going to educate our kids next year? Are we going to send them to public school, private school, homeschool? What are the options here for me?” And those are always my favorite people to talk to. I love nothing more than being able to talk heart-to-heart with another mom and just explain to her why homeschooling is so beneficial to our families. I would love for you to be able to talk about “what are some of the benefits of school?”, “Why do this?”, “Why get started in this whole journey of homeschooling?” Because it’s not always easy. It’s a lot of work actually, but it’s so worth it, and anything worth doing is hard. Can you just talk to the heart of those parents who are maybe just kind of thinking through “Okay, where are we going with this? What are we going to do next?”

Israel Wayne:                Sure. Well, not all homeschoolers are religious, and not religious homeschoolers are of the same faith or religion. But for my wife and I, we’re Christians, and our Christian faith is very important to us. It’s a very defining aspect of our life and who we are. We want to be able to pass our faith onto our children, but I think for all parents, whether they’re religious or not, there’s a desire to pass their values onto their children and to teach them the things that are important to them. Then relationship. One of the things that I talk about in my books is the importance of influence, and if you want to have influence in your child’s life, you have to spend time with them. It’s unfortunate that the vast majority of children growing up in the United States, their parents are not the predominate influence in their life, simply because the parents have given away the number one factor or force in influence, which is time.

Israel Wayne:                So if you want to have influence in your child’s life you need to buy back time, and homeschooling is a wonderful way to do that, because you get to actually be present with your children, to be with them and to teach them your faith and values. In the process of that you will have more conflict, I’ll just be honest, if you do that, as with any relationship, because when you spend time around people you see your faults and you rub each other the wrong way. It’s kind of like marriage, right? The more that you spend time with somebody the more that they can irritate you? But I don’t know very many people who say “The more you spend time with somebody the more possibility there is for conflict or irritations, so don’t get married.”

Israel Wayne:                Most people recognize that there’s a huge payoff in that, yeah, you have more opportunity for conflict, but you have more opportunity for a deep profound loving relationship as well. That’s true with our children, that the more that we spend time with them, them more we’re around them, those conflicts actually give us an opportunity to press into real relationship and a quality and a level of relationship that we would never have if we only saw them occasionally. The same thing with like a marriage relationship, you would just never have the opportunity to really get to know someone or grow into deep love with someone if you just see them occasionally. This opportunity that we have with these children to be the primary influence in their life, for me, as the credit card commercial says, that’s priceless.

Yvette Hampton:           Yeah. I love that. A few weeks ago I interviewed Durenda Wilson, and we were talking about sibling relationships. One of the things that really hit me during our conversation was we were talking about the opportunity that we have as parents to work with our children through their relationship with one another as siblings. Sometimes that can be a really, really hard thing. But what struck me about our conversation was I thought as parents we have a responsibility to teach our children how to handle relationships with other people, and if you can imagine, everyone working and really putting effort and being intentional about teaching our children to get along with one another and to be forgiving and to be loving and to be selfless, and all the of the things that you would expect in a marriage and that you want in a marriage, if we can teach that to our kids with their brothers and sisters, imagine how much better they are going to be prepared for a successful marriage, because you take those same characteristics into marriage and you’re going to have a pretty solid good marriage.

Yvette Hampton:           But when kids learn to be selfish and they’re not around each other and they’re not used to building those family relationship, it makes it hard going into a marriage to then know how to do that. The sibling relationships are so important in addition to the parent/child relationships.

Israel Wayne:                Yeah, for sure. And I’m seeing the fruit of my investment right now in my children, particularly with my oldest, because he works 40 hours a week, and then he volunteers for some things with our church. So he’s gone a lot. So we don’t have that same time that we used to have when he was here all the time and we were teaching him and so forth. But at 19 years old he’s a man now, and he does still live at home for now. But because he’s so busy and he’s working our relational dynamic has changed, and I am, and he is, we’re both best friends in way. My wife and I are best friends, but he’s one of my best friends in the whole world. So our dynamic has changed where it’s not so much parent/child as much as it is that we really are friends.

Israel Wayne:                I appreciate that I have influence in his life that if there ever is anything that I need to talk to him about, like decisions that he’s making or whatever, most of the time he’ll come to me and he’ll ask me for advice and he’ll look for input, or if there’s ever a time where I feel like I need to give him advice or council on a certain direction I try to be sparing with that. He’s open to it, and the reason is because, I look at it a little bit like, I didn’t invent this analogy, but like a relationship bank. Where you put deposits into the bank and you can make a withdrawal every once in a while, because there’s enough cash in there to float a withdrawal. If there’s something I need to talk to him about and say “You know what? I think this decision would be a good decision for you”, or “I think this would be a better decision for you.”

Israel Wayne:                I have some investment there that he will listen to that and he’ll take that onboard because he respects me. And he respects me because I put the time in. Our children have to know that we have their best interests at mind and at heart, and that the things that we’re doing for them, we really are doing for them. Not because it’s easiest for us. Not because it’s most convenient for us, but because we really believe that this is the best decision for them, and of course we’re parents, right? So we’re going to mess up sometimes.

Israel Wayne:                We won’t always call that right, but if your children really believe that you are for them, that you love them, you like them, that you have their best interests in mind and you have invested the best of yourself and your time and your energy in them, generally speaking, that comes back to you in terms of respect and relationship and influence later on in life. But when they know that they’ve been second fiddle, when they know that they’re way down on the priority list, maybe not even two or three, maybe like 8th, 9th, 10th … The average parent in America spends 19 minutes a day with their child.

Yvette Hampton:           Wow.

Israel Wayne:                19 minutes a day.

Yvette Hampton:           Yeah, why even have them?

Israel Wayne:                Yeah, and the average parent in America watches two and a half hours of TV or Netflix every night of their life. I think kids understand that they’re just not a priority to mom and dad in most cases. So when parents come back to them at 18 years old and they’re trying to tell them what they should do … I hear parents all the time, “I don’t know why my kid doesn’t listen to me. He doesn’t like me, won’t pay attention, and ignores everything I say.” Well, they got ignored their whole childhood. So you didn’t put the time in, didn’t put the investment in. So for us, homeschooling is really just an extension of parenting and relationship. I call it Parenting With Academics. We’re not really doing anything radically different. It’s not school-at-home. It’s just the parenting and relationship process, adding academics to that mix.

Yvette Hampton:           Oh, that’s such a great answer. I love that. We were talking about just that relationship between parent and child, and I know when we’re talking about homeschooling and why parents should homeschool oftentimes we talk about it from the perspective of “Don’t put your child in public school.” And I’m going to ask you a question that I know is going to step on some toes, and I don’t ask this in order to do so. I ask this because I really want to think through this. I want parents listening to this to actually think through the process of this, and I want to talk about private Christian school, because oftentimes parents will say “Well, I wouldn’t put my kids in a public school because clearly what they’re being taught there is completely against everything that God’s word says, but if I put them in this really good Christian private school they’ll be fine.”

Yvette Hampton:           And let me just give a disclaimer here. I grew up in a really good Christian private school. I loved the school that I went to and I was discipled by my teachers that I had. I had great Christian, solid Christian, teachers who really helped guide my spiritual walk as a teenager. But that is certainly not always the case, and even now Garritt and I have really come to the conclusion for our family that we believe that homeschooling is best, even if there was a perfect … Well, I shouldn’t say perfect. There’s no such thing as a perfect school or a perfect homeschool. But even if there was an excellent Christian school, as you will, talk to the parent who’s maybe considering “Well, we have this opportunity to put him in a good Christian school or homeschool, because now I look at the relationship part of it and I think I would never want to give up that time with my child and me being the one to disciple them.” What would you say to that parent?

Israel Wayne:                Well, when you look in scripture there’s three different categories that we can evaluate this from. The first is what does God command, or what does God prescribe, and then the second would be what does God allow? Then the third is what does God forbid? Then we can take those three principles and we can apply them to education, and you’ll find that if you’re looking simply at what the scripture prescribes, what it commands, you find repeated commandments for parents to teach their children, instruct their children, disciple their children, discipline their children, train them in the way that they should go. You have multiple passages, dozens of passages in the Bible where God commands parents to teach their children. There are no other groups in the Bible, other people groups, or agencies, that are commanded by God to teach children except in a couple of places. Grandparents, where it says “Teach your sons and sons’ sons”, or “Your children and your children’s children.”

Israel Wayne:                You have just a couple of passages where grandparents are commanded by God to teach their grandchildren. But for the most part it’s parents. Interestingly, the government is never commanded to teach children. They’re told in 1 Peter 2:14 and then Romans 13 that they’re supposed to bear the sword to punish the evildoer, that’s their responsibility. You don’t bear a sword … Bearing the sword doesn’t have anything to do with raising children. Then the church, interestingly, and this’ll be hard for some people, but do your own study on it, there are no passages in the new testament where the church is ever commanded specifically to teach children as a separate entity or separate group, and there are no examples in the new testament early church where the new testament church ever did it. There are none. We have built this entire infrastructure within the church on the idea of the church being responsible for teaching children, and there’s not one verse anywhere in the new testament that supports that concept.

Israel Wayne:                Now, so then you ask “Well, then are you saying it’s forbidden?” Well, no. Things that are not specifically forbidden in scripture, in direct command or in principle, are allowable. So is it wrong for the church to teach children? No, it’s not, and certainly in the context of the body, or the context of the entire church you don’t want to disciple everyone in the church. That’s part of the thing. But a more fully Biblically orbed view of the church’s role in education is that they’re supposed to teach parents how to teach their children. They’re supposed to disciple parents to know how to disciple their own children, not to be replacement parents, not to be surrogate parents who do the work for them. I see very few churches that operate that way, very few churches that even have an understanding of that. I wrote a book called Education: Does God Have an Opinion? And in this book, I talk a lot about that whole concept of what does the Bible say about education and what are the parameters that we should have when we look at this issue?

Israel Wayne:                Finally, when we look at what does God forbid in education, you’ll find that anti-Christian teaching is forbidden. Very expressly, very clearly, in multiple places in scripture, as a Christian parent you cannot lie to your children, you cannot give them false narratives about who God is, about the reality of life and how God is ordained and orchestrated in life-to-work and gender identity and all of those kinds of things. It’s not optional for us to promote an educational system that lies to our children and teaches them things that false, and teaches them things that are anti-Christian. That’s not an option. So, back to Christian schools. Are they allowable? Biblically they’re allowable in that they’re not expressly forbidden in direct command or in principle, but I think when you look at Deuteronomy six and some other passages where Deuteronomy six, it talks about how you’re supposed to teach your children from the time that you wake up in the morning to the time that you go to sleep at night, and you’re supposed to teach them whether they’re inside your house or outside your house.

Israel Wayne:                Is there ever a time when you’re not inside your house or outside your house? Is there ever a time when you’re awake that it isn’t encompassed in that Deuteronomy six mandate? I think you’d have a really hard time doing that when you’re sending your children away from you for over 10000 hours between kindergarten and 12th grade. I don’t know how you fulfill the commands that you’re told to do in scripture when your children are being sent away from you. So there are situations that are less than ideal, and I think that we need to be sympathetic to those.

Israel Wayne:                But even those situations where you don’t have the ideal scenario, you have maybe one parent and that parents has to work and whatever, and other people have to come along and make up for the lack based on the condition, it still has to be in the fear of the lord, it still has to be based on the truth. It can’t be anti-Christian. So there’s a place I think for Christian education that doesn’t look like parents teaching within the home. I think there’s a place for that, but we wouldn’t consider that to be the normal prescribed approach or method in scripture.

Yvette Hampton:           Well said. I want to say, I’m not trying to put down anybody who has their children in school, because like you said, there are many situations where that is necessary. We have a friend, she has cancer right now, and she’s been struggling with her health for years now, and she had to put her children in school this year. It just broke her heart, because she really wants to be home with them, but she couldn’t physically be home with them. So they had to put their kids in school. And God is faithful, our kids belong to him. So I’m not trying to shame anybody who does. I just want to think through-

Israel Wayne:                Yeah, we welcome the church to come along in those moments and help us. One thing I want to say though too is that the average cost for private school right now is 8600 dollars per year per child.

Yvette Hampton:           Yes, it’s very expensive.

Israel Wayne:                Which is crazy-expensive, and parents do it thinking “These people are going to give my children a strong Biblical world view”, and I want to encourage parents to do two things, Google Search a couple of things. Number one, the Gen 2 Survey. G-E-N, the number two, and then Survey. They have a chart in that survey, the Gen 2 Survey, it’s the largest study on church millennials. They have a chart in there that shows how education impacts the outcome of people having faith in Christ, having good relationship with their parents, having satisfaction in life, having a life that reflects Christian values and Christian fruit I guess you would say. All of those things are very dramatically impacted by the education that they receive, and Christian schools, according to the Gen 2 Survey, are producing negative results in your children becoming a Christian, living like a Christian, having a Biblical worldview, having a close relationship with mom and dad and having satisfaction in life. Negative in every one of those categories on the whole.

Yvette Hampton:           Wow.

Israel Wayne:                Christian schools are actually negating against the Christian faith, not helping it, not improving it. Your child is less likely to be a Christian if they go to a Christian school than if they’re homeschooled, by far.

Yvette Hampton:           Wow.

Israel Wayne:                Another thing that I’ll point you to is NehemiahInstitute.com. If you go to NehemiahInstitue.com, on the very homepage there is a graphic that shows Biblical worldview assessment tests of students that are homeschooled, those that are in public school, and those that in Christian school, those that in public school and Christian school, a very low Biblical worldview and decreasing. It’s been decreasing since 1988. Whereas, homeschooling is significantly better and is slightly increasing. Both the Gen 2 Survey and the Nehemiah Institute show that Christian schools and public schools are both actually negative to faith outcomes, whereas homeschooling is positive. So we don’t base what we do on statistics, we base what we do on scripture, but the statistics seem to be bearing out what we find prescribed in scripture, parents taking responsibility for the discipleship of their children works, sending your children away from you to people, who in many cases you don’t even know, to teach your children things, you don’t know what they’re being taught. That approach is not working.

Yvette Hampton:           Yeah, I agree. You were talking earlier about the church and how oftentimes we expect the church to do the discipling of our children and to teach them spiritually and to grow them spiritually. Oftentimes I think parents do that with school as well. We expect them to not just educate them academically, but to educate them spiritually, and that’s a dangerous road to take, because Luke 6:40 says “A student will become like his master.” Well, do you know every one of their teachers, even if it’s a Christian school? Like I said, I went to a great Christian school, but this was almost 30 years ago, and I had great teachers but not all of them were believers. And that’s a touch place, but even when we do that, just like when we go to church, it’s still the parents’ responsibility. So when they’re coming home from school, whether it’s public or private, are we knowing what they’ve been taught and are we undoing anything that has been negatively taught to them according to God’s word, and are we still taking that role of discipleship with their hearts, because that still ultimately is the role of parents?

Israel Wayne:                One more thing on the Christian schools. Nehemiah Institute has a Biblical worldview assessment test, and the Christian school teachers as well as students, and one of the things that they show is that the majority of Christian school teachers actually have a worldview that is either secular, humanist, or socialist. And you think “Well, how could that be?” I was talking with Dan Smith with the guy that is the leader of Nehemiah Institute, and he said that one of the reasons for that is that schools, because they cost so much money, Christian schools, they are requiring these teachers to be certified. 30 years ago that wasn’t a requirement, but now the schools are requiring they have teacher certification.

Israel Wayne:                Well, where do they get that teacher certification? In most cases if you graduate from a teacher school you have gotten the most anti-Christian humanist socialist education on the planet, and you’ve been certified that you passed. So you bring these teachers in on the basis of their academic credentials and that they sign your statement of faith, but most schools never have any Biblical worldview assessment that they give before they hire to find out do they know how to think Biblically about social issues and about economics and science and so forth.

Yvette Hampton:           Right. I don’t remember who I heard this from for the first time, it was many years ago. But as I heard when my oldest was a baby I think, is that we’re not raising children, we are raising adults. And that’s very true. We’re raising adults, we’re raising these kids to be all that God has created them to be. In your book called Education: Does God Have an Opinion, in the appendix on that one you have a sectioned called A Christian Education Manifesto. I would love for you to kind of jump into that and talk about what that is.

Israel Wayne:                Sure. Well, I’ve often had people say to me that God doesn’t have an opinion on education, God doesn’t care how we educate our children, there’s no one-size-fits-all, what works for you may not work for me, there’s public school, private school, charter school, online school, homeschool, and people often say “You can’t say that God has one prescribed approach that’s the right fit for everybody.” That sounds really good, until you actually study the scripture on it, and my book, Education: Does God Have an Opinion, this book came out of a conversation that I had with my mother when I was a teenager, a young teenager, and I made that statement. I said “I don’t know whether I’ll homeschool my children or not. I guess I’ll just have to find out what my wife wants to do”, and I kind of liked being homeschooled myself. There were definite perks to it. I liked not having to get up till 9:00 in the morning and do school in my pajamas and not have to stand outside when it was cold and wait for the school bus.

Israel Wayne:                There were perks, there were things I thought were pretty good about homeschooling, but as a young teen I’d never really done a scriptural study on it. My mom encouraged me, she said “I would like you to write an essay and defend that viewpoint, that God doesn’t care about education, it doesn’t matter how you educate your children. Defend that viewpoint, but defend it from the Bible, not just your opinion, but find scripture that actually supports your view that any form of schooling is equal and valid.” So, I thought, “Well, this shouldn’t take too long.” I thought I’d be able to whip something together in a couple hours, and I started studying that topic and boy, 30 years later I’m still studying the topic. But I found I was definitively wrong, that God was not silent on education, that God wrote voluminously on the issue of education and the scripture, both old testament and new testament, is absolutely full of statements of how God wants his children to be educated. He’s not silent on the issue, he has spoken.

Israel Wayne:                So that appendix is mostly just scripture verses. This whole book has a lot of scripture in it all the way through it, but that appendix in the back is kind of a compilation where I just took a bunch of passages of scripture and applied it. One thing I’ll say about it is that when you see a universal principle that applied to everything, that universal principle that applies to everything applies to everything that it applies to. Everything it applies to is everything. So if you’re talking about everything, then you’re also talking about education, because education is a subset of everything. When you see something that God says that’s universally true for everything, then you have to say, “God has made this statement about education as well.” So just when you look through some of these passages, let me just grab a few of them, we sometimes don’t think about some of these passages as applying to education in particular, or schooling.

Israel Wayne:                Like take Psalm 1 for example, it says “Blessed is the man who walks not in the council of the wicked.” Let’s just stop there. What kind of council are your children getting in the school that they’re in? Is it Godly council, or is it ungodly council? Is it wicked council? Is it teaching them the truth about their origins, or is it lying to them about who made them and where they came from? Is it teaching that God created everything in six days, or is it teaching them that they’re the result of a cosmic accident four billion years ago? Is it teaching them that God made them male and female, or is it teaching them that gender is a fluid concept? Is it teaching them that there are moral absolutes and there’s right and wrong that’s truly objective for all people and all places and all times, or is it teaching them relativism, that truth is in the eye of the beholder and what might be true for you is not true for me, we can decide our own truth, we can make our own path?

Israel Wayne:                What is it teaching them about even sex before marriage, and so many of these things? But what is the school teaching them? Is it Godly council, or is it ungodly? Well, this tells us we’re supposed to avoid the council of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners. What’s the social environment of the school like? Is it a Godly social environment? We’re told in Proverbs 13:20 that “He who walks with wise will become wise, but a companion of fools will be destroyed.” What’s the social environment like? Or in 1 Corinthians 15:33 we’re told “Do not be deceived. Bad company corrupts good character.” So what kind of social environment are your children being exposed to? So many times people bring up the socialization quote, “Aren’t you concerned about socialization?”

Yvette Hampton:           Yes.

Israel Wayne:                “Well, yes. That’s why we’re homeschooling. We don’t want our children to be in the way of sinners.” Now you’re saying “Oh, so you’re saying that you want to isolate your children and never allow them to spend time with anyone who’s not a Christian?” Well, I talked about this in the first podcast and those that didn’t listen to it should go back and listen to it, but the number one factor in influence in someone’s life is time, and if you let your children spend significant time around other children, those children will influence your child. It will just happen. If you let them spend time around anybody! A video game console. An iPod.

Israel Wayne:                They’re going to be influenced by what they spend most time around. So the question is who do you want to be that influence, their peer group, or you as a parent? If you spend time around wise people you become wise, but around foolish people you will be destroyed. Well, what are foolish people? Well, in Proverbs 22:15 it says, “Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child.” That’s one Biblical definition of a fool. The other Biblical definition of a fool that comes to mind is when the scripture says, “The fool has said in his heart there is no God.” So what do we do as Christian parents?

Israel Wayne:                We think “I want my child to be well-rounded, and I want them to be successful in life, so I’m going to put them in a classroom with 30 to 40 children that the Bible says has foolishness bound up in their heart and have an atheist teacher who says there is no God, and if they’re not in that environment with this atheist teacher that the Bible calls a fool, and these students that God calls foolish, if they’re not just immersed in this pool of foolishness they won’t be able to grow up and be socially well-adjusted.” Well, where did we get that idea? We didn’t get that idea from scripture. Scripture doesn’t support that idea. Scripture never tells you “Make sure you socialize your children with lots of other children.” I challenge you, parents, get your Bible, get a concordance, look it up, do a passage search on this.

Yvette Hampton:           Do a 30 year essay.

Israel Wayne:                Yeah, do your essay. Find from scripture where it tells you “Make sure your children spend lots of time around other children so they can be socially well-rounded.” It doesn’t say that. In fact, it says the opposite. It says “Make sure they spend a lot of time around wise people.” Well, who are wise people? Wise people tend to be older, tend to have the fear of the lord, and it then it talks about not having them sitting in the seat of the scoffer. Well, what’s the social environment again? Is it one that mocks and scoffs at authority? Is it one that undermines parental authority? Well, if that’s the social environment they shouldn’t be in that environment. But then someone says, “So what’s the antidote?” But instead of all that, his delight should be in the law of the lord and on his law, God’s law, he should meditate day and night. How can you meditate day and night when God’s law is not even allowed in a government school?

Yvette Hampton:           That’s right.

Israel Wayne:                We violate the thing that it tells us to do, create an educational context where you can meditate day and night on the law of the lord. We violate that. We violate all the things it tells us not to do, and then we somehow expect that it’s all going to turn out okay. That’s just one passage or scripture where the Bible has spoken really clearly to the issue of education, but people don’t think about it as an education passage because it doesn’t use the word school. So that’s what I do in this book, Education: Does God Have an Opinion, is I just go through dozens and dozens and dozens of passages just like that, and when you really are honest about it and study what the scripture says, it’s forceful that children need an explicitly, exclusively Christian education.

Yvette Hampton:           Yup, that’s right. I couldn’t agree more. Can you take us back a little bit to John Dewey, Horace Mann, those guys who really have kind of influenced what public school is today, because they had an agenda. Talk about that a little bit.

Israel Wayne:                Most people for some reason believe that public schools in America were started by Christians, that they were Christian, that basically they promoted Christian principles, Christian values, up until about maybe the late 1960s when they started to lose their way a little bit, and today they’re not ideal. That’s kind of where most Christians are on it, but most Christians have never really studied the history of government schools. If you go back and you study the Prussian school system, which is the one that our American system was founded on, you find that there was an intentional design on the part of the atheist God-haters to get children away from their parents so that they can indoctrinate them in anti-Christian worldview, and Horace Mann, who was in Massachusetts, he was a Unitarian God-hater, he started the compulsory attendance movement in Massachusetts in the 1850s.

Israel Wayne:                By the year 1900 basically every state in the United States had adopted compulsory attendance laws where you had to attend these government schools. And Dewey’s role was to make sure that there were virtually no options for parents, that they had to have their children in a government tax-funded school, and whatever the government funds it controls. So Dewey started out with some basic Bible reading and prayers being allowed within the classroom, but his goal was over time to slowly remove all of that and just create a kind of secular utopia where everyone would come together under the banner of moral goodness, because as a Unitarian he didn’t believe in a personal God, he denied the doctrine of the trinity. He believed that all people were good, morally good, and that they would all come together and create a utopian society if you just get religion out of the picture.

Israel Wayne:                And John Dewey, who was a teacher of teachers in the 1930s, he really revolutionized the schools, particularly in the 30s. He had gone to Russia, Vladimir Lenin’s wife had invited him there. He met Joseph Stalin’s wife, who was a big fan of his. They wanted him to come, he was the most famous teacher in American, the founder of the NEA, and they said “We want you to come here and teach us everything you know about pedagogy, about teaching method, and we want to teach you how to teach economic socialism in the classroom. In the 1930s they changed the textbooks where they pulled out three subjects that had been taught separately, history, civics, and geography, and replaced those with a Marxist curriculum called Social Studies, that had never been taught before. From the 1930s on there was a strong socialist push within the government school system.

Israel Wayne:                I talk about some of this in this book, Answers for Homeschooling, the Top 25 Questions Critics Ask, this is my latest homeschooling book, and a little bit also in this book, Education: Does God Have an Opinion? For people that don’t know the history of the government school system, you just need to do your homework and there’s other great books out there by Samuel Blumenfeld and John Taylor Gatto. Those two guys were two of the best education historians, they’ve both passed on now, but great resources. And the IndoctriNation film. IndoctriNation: Decline of Christianity in America. Those are all must reads.

Yvette Hampton:           Yeah, absolutely. That’s a great film. We watched that early in our homeschooling journey and it really had a great impact on our lives. And you were part of that documentary as well. Just like you’re a part of Schoolhouse Rocked.

Israel Wayne:                Ah, we’re looking forward to that.

Yvette Hampton:           Oh gosh, us too. Us too. All right. In the last few minutes that we have I want to talk about just some practical things for parents, because we’re kind of talking about the getting started, and this interview with you, we’re kind of talking about the why. Like why homeschool? Why does it even matter that we don’t have our kids in school? Isn’t education just education? Isn’t it all academics? Aren’t they all teaching kids math, writing, this and that? And you and I have talked about this before. As a matter of fact, I think we talked about this on the last podcast, but for those who maybe are new to listening to this podcast, the reason that Garritt and I have been so convicted about educating our kids at home and why it’s so different in teaching them from a Biblical worldview is because not everything … Sorry, I’ve got a notice popping up on my thing here.

Yvette Hampton:           Everything that we teach our kids should point them to Christ. Math can point them to Christ, because God is the God or order. He is the God of absolutes. So, when we see math laid out and we understand how all these numbers and formulas work together we understand the awesomeness of God. When we study science, we understand God as our creator. When we study history from a Biblical worldview, we understand God’s plan for mankind, and so on. So when we take God out of those things, which is precisely what the government schools have done, then we’re really doing a disservice to our children and to their hearts really, because math is not just math, science is not just science, history is not just history. So I really appreciate your take on that. So now that we’ve talked about all that I want to talk about just the practical part of getting started with homeschooling.

Yvette Hampton:           What does a parent do if they’ve got their child in school, especially in a public school? At a private school they’re not going to really question it, but maybe they’ve got their child in a public school, especially if it’s in the middle of the year, and they’re just feeling like the lord is calling them to homeschool. How do they go about doing that? How do we just say “Okay, we’re going to pull our kids out of school now, and golly, with all that’s happening right now in the public school system and all of the parental rights that are being taken away?” We’re seeing parents pulling their kids out left and right. So can you talk to that parent and offer some encouragement to them?

Israel Wayne:                Absolutely. Well, the first thing is, again, this book, Answers for Homeschooling, the Top 25 Questions That Critics Ask, I literally answer almost every question you can imagine about homeschooling. How to get started. How to choose a curriculum. Is it legal? What about socialization? Shouldn’t I have my kids in school to be salt and light? What about different learning styles, different learning teaching methods? I cover all that in this book, Answers for Homeschooling. So you definitely want to get that book, because Mike Smith of HSLDA said something like “This is the Walmart and Costco of homeschool books. It’s everything you need to know about homeschooling in one source.”

Yvette Hampton:           I agree.

Israel Wayne:                But what I would recommend, mentioning Mike Smith, that you become a member of HSLDA, go to their website, hslda.org, because they will provide support for you, make sure that you’re protected legally. They have a host of information on their website. You can get connected to state organizations. You should always be connected with the Christian State Homeschooling Association in your state. There’s a list of those on the HSLDA website. Also there’s a website called homeschoolfreedom.com, and there are state organizations that are mentioned there as well.

Yvette Hampton:           Yeah, we actually have a link to that on the Schoolhouse Rocked website. If you go to SchoolhouseRocked.com right on the front page there’s a button that says “Homeschooling in your state”, that will take you straight to Homeschool Freedom.

Israel Wayne:                Then from those state associations, when you finally find your state association, almost all the state associations have a homeschool conference, the larger states do at least. You will want to attend a homeschool conference in your state. They have wonderful teaching, lots of great speakers, workshops on almost every possible topic, vendors that take curriculum. You can go and look at the curriculum and see what’s available and ask questions. There are homeschool experts there. There’s community, and from those state associations you can get plugged into local homeschool support groups, local co-ops in your area, so that you’re not just homeschooling in isolation, but you can homeschool with the community around you. I would also recommend going to nheri.orgNational Home Education Research Institute. They area research group with Dr. Brian Ray. They have all kinds of statistics.

Israel Wayne:                I have a lot of that in the Answers for Homeschooling book, because you’re going to have skeptics, right? You’re going to have in-laws, you’re going to have people say “Well, is this a good choice?” And “How are your children going to turn out academically?” I’ve consolidated a lot of the highlights into that book, but there are maybe specific question that people ask you and Dr. Ray has done fabulous research on all that. So having facts is really important, because you’re going to meet people who have opinions, and you’re going to be able to trump their opinions with fact. So that’s part of what I’m doing with the Answers book is trying to give you fact to refute the opinion. But definitely, member of HSLDA, become a member of your state homeschool association, get plugged into a local support group, and check out Answers for Homeschooling, I think it’s a great way to get going. Then there are lots of Facebook discussion groups.

Yvette Hampton:           Which some can be a little dangerous.

Israel Wayne:                Some can be a little bit dangerous, yeah. Again, a lot of the state homeschool associations now are starting their own, and those have some guidance from people that actually know what they’re talking about. So if you find your state association ask them if they have a discussion group, because they’ll kind of make sure that things don’t derail. It’s amazing how many people are maybe not factual, but boy, they have strongly held views. I’m in Michigan and we had somebody recently that said “I’m new to homeschooling. I’m just looking into this. How do I get started? What are the laws about homeschooling in Michigan?” And somebody said “Oh, there are no laws on homeschooling in Michigan.” I’m the vice president of our state homeschool association, so I had to get on there and say “Well, actually there are, and know what they are, because it’s really relevant to your life.” So it’s just amazing how people are really free to share what they think they know, but you really do want to find people that know what they’re talking about, and the state homeschool associations are a great place to do that.

Yvette Hampton:           Yeah, they really are. We love state organizations and HSLDA both, because you all have worked so beautifully together. HSLDA, Homeschool Legal Defense Association, this is not a commercial for them. They’re not paying us to say this. This is just something that we strongly believe in. But HSLDA and the state organizations are two groups of people that really work hand-in-hand together in order to keep … They’ve worked to make homeschooling legal, because it has not always been legal. They’ve worked to keep homeschooling legal, and then they work to really provide the resources and encouragement that families need in their own individual states. And like you said, knowing what the laws are, knowing what their rights are as parents. So like you said, on our website we’ve got the link to homeschooling in your state, and people can go straight there. They can look at their own state organization, contact them directly and say “Hey, what do we need to do?” HSLDA is the same way.

Yvette Hampton:           They’ve got tons of consultants that will actually walk you through what you need to do for your state. HSLDA has representatives for every state and they will help you figure out what you need to do to legally homeschool in your state, because every state is different. Literally, every state is different. We homeschooled in California, and I was just talking to someone today, I was saying “Ironically, homeschooling in California’s one of the easiest things to do.” It will not always be this way, I’m 100% certain with the direction that California’s going. That’s a different topic, but homeschooling is very easy in California. You don’t really have to do a whole lot of anything. You have to keep attendance and file an affidavit, but other than that it’s much easier than some states that require a lot of … They have all kinds of rules and laws. So, anyway. But yes, that’s a great thing, and your book, we have it and it’s fantastic. I want to talk really quickly. We’re just going to over on this, and I’m not going to worry about it.

Yvette Hampton:           I’m trying so hard to keep these podcasts short, but there’s so much good information here. Really quickly, I want to talk about the last thing, and we’ve touched on this already in this conversation, but what really matters? When parents are thinking of homeschooling, or they’re thinking about continuing to homeschool, is it curriculum that matters, is it keeping the perfect schedule, is it keeping our house clean? What is it that really matters? What is the heart of homeschooling our kids? And we talked about relationships, or course, but I would love for you to talk about this as a homeschool dad, and from the perspective of a dad. How have you gone about discipling the hearts of your children, because obviously discipleship is really what matters. It’s not curriculum. It’s not the perfect pretty schedule. It’s pointing our kids towards Christ. So can you very quickly talk to moms and especially to dads right now, and talk to them about as a dad what really matters and how do you disciple your kids?

Israel Wayne:                I, a lot of times, think of children in our home as sort of the thermometer of the spiritual and relational temperature of our family, and when we see all kinds of bad attitudes and relational conflicts and stress and strife and lack of respect and all of that, we don’t like that, right? We look at it and go “Wow, it’s frigid in here, emotionally, relationally, spiritually.” We don’t like the temperature. But what we don’t think about sometimes is that we as the parents, we’re the thermostat, and if we want to see the temperature in our house, our relationships change, we change that by changing us. I get letters from people all day every day asking me “How can I change my child? How can I change my child? How can I change my child?” Well, the bad news is that the way that God has orchestrated things, usually the path to our child’s heart is through our heart.

Israel Wayne:                You see this in Deuteronomy in chapter six where it says “This law which I give you this day shall be on your heart. Then you teach it diligently to your children.” So, God wants our heart first, and as dads in particular, I think even more than moms, we’re the thermostat for the family. Man, I notice if I come home grumpy and I have brought work home and stress home, and I’ve allowed my day to impact my mood and I bring that into my home and I externalize that on my wife, what happens to my wife? She gets grumpy. And it’s easy to do, but I can’t take it out on my boss. I work for myself, but we’ve all had those scenarios where there’re certain scenarios you just can’t externalize how you really feel there. So there’re certain times that I can’t take it out. So if I bring that home and I’m just negative and I externalize that on my wife, what happens? She feels that stress, she gets negative, and then who does she externalize it to? She externalizes it to the children.

Israel Wayne:                Then who do they externalize it? Well, the younger children, or to each other. Then what do we do? We tell them “Stop acting like that or you get disciplined.” Well, right, well, who did that? We did it, right? We set the temperature. We set the tone. So in terms of the big picture, what we’re going for, is we’re really going for God to conquer all of our hearts, and being home in an environment where we’re together, we’re working together for a common goal, a common purpose, we’re a team, we learn things in that process of teamwork of you have to have leaders, you have to have followers, just like any team, but we learn things in that process that make us more like Christ, cause us to press through the difficult things into the deeper relationships.

Israel Wayne:                And if we avoid that, if just avoid each other, yeah, we’re avoiding conflict, but we’re also avoiding relationship. So, I just think that God created this concept called family and in America we’ve done everything that we can to get away from it. We just try to avoid each other, because we think that that’ll lessen conflict. And it does, it lessens conflict, but it also ruins relationship. So, I really believe that God is a relational God, he wants us to know him, he wants us to be in a relationship with him, but he also wants us to enter into and take the risk of relationship with each other. When the family works, homeschooling works. When the family’s not working, homeschooling’s chaos.

Israel Wayne:                So you can change curriculum, you can find a better math program, you can fix the academics, that’s not hard. That’s really, really doable. The relationships are where you have to focus, and if the relationships are in order and everything’s working, you’re going to find the homeschooling process goes relatively easy. It’s not easy, but relatively easy if the family’s working. But, man, when you got people that hate each other or they’re at each other’s throats, it’s grueling. So you’ve got to fix that, and that’s why our ministry’s called Family Renewal, and we encourage you visit our website at FamilyRenewal.org, because that’s what we’re about, we’re about family discipleship and about those relationships.

Yvette Hampton:           Yeah, I love it. You’ve got a great ministry, and you will be speaking, we mentioned this in part one, you’re going to be speaking for the Homegrown Generation Family Expo that’s coming up February 17th through the 21st, and you’re going to be speaking specifically on this topic of family relationships. The day, the 19th, that you’ll be speaking, that whole day is going to be about family relationships. We’re opening it up that day with Kirk Cameron, and he’s going to be talking about marriage. It’s going to be followed by Ginger Hubbard talking about discipling the heart of your child, or Reaching the Heart of Your Child I think is actually the title of her session, and then Durenda Wilson is going to be talking about sibling relationships. And you’re going to kind of tie it all together that day, as well as on the panel.

Yvette Hampton:           We’ve got a panel at the end of that day with all three of you just to answer some questions from those who will be part of the event. So if you guys have not yet signed up for the Homegrown Generation Family Expo, please do so. It’s only $20. You get the live event, it’ll be streamed live through Facebook and through the Homegrown Generation website. Then you’ll have lifetime access to be able to watch any of the sessions that you would like to watch at any time, and lots of free stuff. So we’ve got free virtual swag bags and lots of contest giveaways and things like that. It’s going to be a really fun event, but we are really excited to have you as part of that, and really just encouraged by your message, Israel, and the ministry that God had put on your heart. So, we’re excited to bring you back into the Expo to talk more about that with people, and then be able to interact with the people who are watching live.

Israel Wayne:                Yeah, it’ll be fun.

Yvette Hampton:           It’s going to be a lot of fun. So HomegrownGeneration.com. You can register on there. Israel, thank you again for your time. Thank you for your wisdom, and just for all you do for the homeschool community and for families. You are a huge blessing.

Israel Wayne:                Well, we appreciate you guys and we’re excited about your ministry.

Yvette Hampton:           Thank you.

Israel Wayne:                We look forward to the conference. So again, everybody make sure you register and join the fun.

Check out Israel’s Books:

Answers for Homeschooling: Top 25 Questions Critics Ask, by Israel Wayne

Education: Does God Have an Opinion?, by Israel Wayne

Pitchin’ A Fit!: Overcoming Angry and Stressed-Out Parenting, by Israel and Brook Wayne

Recommended Resources:

Israel Wayne, Christian Education: A Manifesto 

The Gen2 Survey, by NHERI (National Home Education Research Institute) – This study examines adults who attended church growing up and seeks to understand the key influences which either encouraged or deterred them from believing and practicing the faith of their parents.

HSLDA – Home School Legal Defense Association

NHERI (National Home Education Research Institute)

State Homeschool Organizations 

Nehemiah Institute 

Scripture References:

Psalm 1

Proverbs 13:20

Proverbs 22:15

1 Corinthians 15:33

1 Peter 2:14

Homeschooling Children with Special Needs

“I had a friend who was homeschooling, and she was joking with me and saying, ‘You’re homeschooling, you’re a homeschooler. Just wait and see, you’re going to homeschool.’ And I said, ‘No, no, no.’ I didn’t want to homeschool. That wasn’t on my radar at all. But God just really started working in my heart too, that I wanted to be the one to disciple my children and raise them up in the Lord.”- Faith Berens

Faith Berens is a special needs education consultant with the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA). As a special needs consultant for HSLDA, Faith helps families find educational solutions for their children’s learning challenges and disabilities. She has worked as a classroom teacher, in both public and private schools, a Reading Recovery® teacher, an NILD educational therapist, and as a private tutor. Faith specializes in child literacy and has a master’s degree in reading from Shenandoah University. She draws on her extensive experience with learning difficulties including her own struggle with dyscalculia and homeschooling her own children with unique learning challenges to help homeschool students facing their own learning struggles. Her areas of expertise are early childhood literacy, reading assessment, and the identification and remediation of reading difficulties and disabilities.

Yvette Hampton:           For those of you who are not familiar with HSLDA, maybe you’re just jumping onto this whole homeschooling train and you’re trying to figure out what it is, HSLDA is the Home School Legal Defense Association. They are a fantastic organization that really protects our rights as homeschoolers. They’ve been around for quite some time now, about 30 years, right, Faith?

Faith Berens:                35 actually.

Yvette:                         35 years! I knew that there was just an anniversary last year and I couldn’t remember if it was 30 or 35. For the past 35 years they have been fighting for the rights for us to be able to homeschool our children. Faith is one of their special needs consultants, and I’m excited to have her on the show. So welcome to the show.

Listen to Faith on The Schoolhouse Rocked Podcast (8/27/2019 episode)

Faith:                            Thank you. Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be a part of this ministry and what you’re doing. It’s really awesome to be your guest today.

Yvette:                         Yeah. Thank you so much. Tell us about you and your family and your background.

Faith:                            Sure. I’m a homeschooling mom of two. I have a 16-year-old daughter. She’ll be 17 soon, and she has her learner’s permit. She’ll be getting her driver’s license soon, so everybody can pray for me. And then my son is nine, so we have two, and my mom lives with us, so she helps with our homeschooling and we live here in northern Virginia in Fauquier County, and have been homeschooling for 12 plus years.

Yvette:                         Wow. I Love Northern Virginia. It’s one of my favorite parts of the country. We went several years ago, and I remember driving through the Shenandoah Valley. It’s so beautiful. I felt like we were driving through a picture. I think it was October and it was just breathtaking. You live in a very, very beautiful part of the country. I’m from the desert in California, so it’s quite different than what I grew up with.

So, we want to talk today about special needs. Several months ago we talked a little bit about special needs on The Schoolhouse Rocked Podcast, so I wanted to have you on because I know that this is a huge concern for a lot of moms, especially for moms who are just starting to think about homeschooling or maybe they are feeling like God is prompting them towards homeschooling, but they think, “I’ve got a special needs student,” and I know that we’ll talk about kind of the whole range of what special needs is, but they think “I’ve got a special needs student and so I can’t.” Oftentimes I think that’s because their doctor or their school counselor or their child’s preschool teacher or kindergarten teacher says, “Oh, well, they need to be in this specific program.” And so as parents we think, “Well, we want what’s best for our kids. And, of course, this is what’s best for them. So, we must put them in this special program.” So, I would love for you to, first, tell your story. Tell us about how you got involved with special needs and homeschooling.

“I always had a heart for my students that were struggling.”

Faith:                            Sure. Well, it’s kind of a long and winding story, but God doesn’t waste anything. So, I was always a struggling student myself and I have what’s called dyscalculia, which is the math learning disability. And I usually tell parents they can think of that as the math version of dyslexia. So I struggled all through school, but with the help of my mom and getting tutors and accommodations in place, I did fine with that kind of support. I’m a product of public school unfortunately, but went off to college and that’s really where I got the official diagnosis of dyscalculia, and again with accommodations and support was able to do really well, and then went on to get a master’s degree. So I mean, God doesn’t waste anything.

This transcript is generously provided by MakeCrate. MakeCrate provides your homeschooler with the STEM skills they need for the future! Fun, hands-on electronics kits paired with an online learning platform teach your middle or high schooler engineering and coding fundamentals right at home! No technical expertise is required. Order your MakeCrate today at MakeCrate.Club/SR.    

I always had a heart for my students that were struggling. I ended up majoring in education and then became a reading specialist, and it felt like God put me in public school and private school. That was my ministry. But then when my own children came along, I sent my daughter off to kindergarten half-day, and I was the reading specialist at the school where she was. And she was very high in reading and had a lot of struggles in math as well. She had some attention, focus issues, and some low frustration tolerance, things going on. And naturally in the afternoon I was working with her and supplementing what she was getting at school and loving being home with her. God laid it on my heart to want to be home and to have another child, and I wanted to be my kids’ teacher.

And so, I had a friend who was homeschooling, and she was joking with me and saying, “You’re homeschooling, you’re a homeschooler. Just wait and see, you’re going to homeschool. And I said, “No, no, no.” I didn’t want to homeschool. That wasn’t on my radar at all. But God just really started working in my heart too, that I wanted to be the one to disciple my children and raise them up in the Lord. And that education was about a lot more than just academics. So naturally we made the shift. I left public school and my husband said, “Well, if you can find a job working in your field and making x amount of money part time and work from home,” I still needed to work part-time. And we started praying and I just felt, “What am I going to do?

I’m a trained teacher. What else am I going to do?” How am I going to find a work from job part-time in my niche, which is reading specialist in dyslexia, but serving homeschoolers or private school students and get out of public school. And I just started praying, God, get me out of Egypt and random laundry list. And within six months, God worked it out. There was a job at HSLDA. I didn’t even seek it. It fell in my lap. He opened so many doors. He’s so faithful. So I like to share that story with other parents that think, “How am I going to homeschool? First of all, I don’t know what to do” or I don’t have any training, I don’t have any background” or “I don’t think I’m going to have support. I don’t even know where to start.”

But you know, God orchestrates things and He doesn’t waste any of our experiences and He will provide a way and the resources, and His timing is perfect.

Yvette:                         Yes, I love that. Talk about some of the special needs that parents face today, and then talk about some of the benefits that there are to homeschooling those kids.

Faith:                            Sure. We see a huge gamut, anywhere from gifted students, to gifted with learning disabilities, though they’re referred to as twice exceptional. So they might have a learning disability or a processing problem on top of being gifted. Dyslexia is huge. I mean about one in five people, it depends on what stat you read, it can be one in five to one in 10 people, are impacted with dyslexia. And then of course autism has skyrocketed. And so those are the big groups. More and more families are pulling kids out of school to homeschool because of special needs, specifically autism and dyslexia.

“We always tell parents that homeschooling really is an individualized education program. And that’s what it is, due to its very nature. So parents are uniquely gifted. They know their children better than anybody. They love them more than anyone else. They want to see them succeed. You’re going to have much lower teacher-to-student ratios in the home setting. When you compare that with even the very best special needs resource room, with a trained teacher, their case loads are one and 15.”

We get a lot of phone calls and a lot of emails for those two subgroups, but it can be anywhere from anything, from just attention to processing problems to anxiety. We’re seeing a lot more children that are struggling with mental health issues, bullying. And so sometimes parents will call and say, “I don’t know if I’m really, if my child’s really special needs or not.” And I mean, I just kind of say, “You know, we all have special meetings, we’re all unique, we’re all special, and we all have specific needs.” So whether it’s just a slight struggle or attention issues or severe medical needs anywhere, it’s just a huge spectrum.

Yvette:                         So then talk about the benefits of bringing those children home or keeping them home if you’ve not yet started school with them.

“I mean, in our public schools, kids are falling through the cracks.”

Faith:                            Right. Well, we always tell parents that homeschooling really is an individualized education program. And that’s what it is, due to its very nature. So parents are uniquely gifted. They know their children better than anybody. They love them more than anyone else. They want to see them succeed. You’re going to have much lower teacher-to-student ratios in the home setting. When you compare that with even the very best special needs resource room, with a trained teacher, their case loads are one and 15. It’s individualized. You’ve got a low teacher-student ratio. You’re able to customize instruction for them, gear your pacing, student needs, frequent breaks, you can schedule around their sleep needs, medication needs, therapy. And it’s just truly a better scenario than what they’re going to get in a school setting because the schools can only do so much. They’re understaffed. And even though we’ve thrown billions of dollars at education and special education, the national report card for rating progress is terrible.

I mean, in our public schools, kids are falling through the cracks, and I’m not slamming public school teachers. I have friends that are believers that are there and they’re serving and they’re doing the best they can. But oftentimes their hands are tied and they’re understaffed and don’t have the resources they need. So parents are uniquely able to do this. They don’t need special training. They need to just love and encourage their kids and meet them where they are. And that’s the other beauty of homeschooling is we can truly meet our kids where they are developmentally. Reading develops on a continuum. So does math skills, and we can meet them where they are right in that zone of proximal development where it’s not too hard and it’s not too easy. And sometimes kids are reading at one level and math is on a different level. So it’s really a beautiful thing and it works really well. And there’s research to show that it’s working well for students with special needs. So parents don’t need to fear and they don’t need to cave into those when the questions come.

Yvette:                         Probably the biggest reason that parents who have children with special needs choose not to homeschool is out of fear. And you said something earlier that I think is so important to remember is that we know our kids better than anyone and we love them more than anyone. We talk a lot about that on the podcast. There are some excellent teachers out there, but they don’t know your children the way that you know them. They don’t know their … you talked about their sleep patterns and their medications and their different therapies that they may have to go to, and their teachers in a classroom, they cannot cater to those things like mom and dad can. And so it’s such a beautiful opportunity for mom to be able to come alongside her child and really help them develop in the way that God has created them because God’s made your child the way that they are for a purpose.

And it’s not my mistake that you are their mom or that you are their dad. And so for those parents who are very fearful of keeping their kids at home to homeschool, then because again, like we said in the beginning, they’ve been told by their doctors and everyone else that they need to be in these special programs. How would you encourage those parents to get started? What do they do to get started with helping their children?

Faith:                            So, I mean obviously one of the first things I would encourage them, it would be to join HSLDA because oftentimes families will encounter some difficulties and pushbacks when there’s a child with special needs, typically from a well-meaning medical provider or a psychologist or a neighbor or something.

Yvette:                         Right. And that can be scary.

Faith:                            Yeah, it can be. But a lot of times people will question and oftentimes, quite frankly due to ignorance, they don’t understand homeschooling, they don’t understand the homeschooling law or just misinformation. So I would tell them to join, and I would also help arm them with resources. If you’re just getting started schooling a child with special needs, or let’s say you’re pulling out of public school and closing an IEP, then navigate that process well. We help them to do that, how do they withdraw and close the IEP.

Yvette:                         Now explain what an IEP is.

“A lot of times parents are fearful because they think “I’m not trained,” or “I don’t have any special background.”, but they are the expert when it comes to their child, so we’re arming them with some good resources. If you have a child with dyslexia, then we’re going to point you to resources and books and services for dyslexia or autism because knowledge is power and we battle fear by prayer and trusting in God…”

Faith:                            So, an IEP is drafted by schools. It’s an individualized education plan. Sometimes students will have what’s called a 504 accommodation plan, but basically it’s just a contract between the school and the parent, and it lays out this is the instruction we’re going to provide or the intervention services or therapies, the frequency of those services where they will occur. Is it in a regular classroom? Is it in a resource room? Is it in a therapy room? Something like that.

And then they’ll have goals. They’ll have long-term goals and short term goals for the student to meet. Most often those are academic. Sometimes they’re social goals, social skills and goals on there as well, or fine motor and gross motor. But typically they’re mostly academicals. But if parents have had their child in public school and they’ve had an IEP, we’ll help them navigate how to close that. Should they close it? Do they maybe want to homeschool, but then also get some services through the school district. That’s a parental option and a choice. HSLDA’s stances is private services are best if at all possible.

But some parents will choose to keep therapeutic or what’s called “related services”, so we’ll help them to transition then to what’s called a service plan. If they opt to do that. But many, many parents by and large just choose to homeschool and not get those services and not have an official IEP drafted by the school because again, homeschooling is an individualized educational plan.

A lot of times parents are fearful because they think “I’m not trained,” or “I don’t have any special background.”, but they are the expert when it comes to their child, so we’re arming them with some good resources. If you have a child with dyslexia, then we’re going to point you to resources and books and services for dyslexia or autism because knowledge is power and we battle fear by prayer and trusting in God and learning, and “what does God say about me and about my child?” A lot of times in my work with HSLDA, I’ll get the privilege to get to pray with parents and help them to press through their fear and overcome the obstacles that are in their way, that’s causing the fear. And sometimes it’s funding. “Hey, my child needs therapy and we’re broke.” Homeschooling is a financial sacrifice anyway, and when you throw special needs on top of it and medications or therapy or we need this adaptive equipment assistive technology, then we’ll help them with funding sources, too.

Yvette:                         Which is great because I know that that’s really enticing for a lot of families that maybe they do want to bring their kids home and they want to school them at home, but they can’t afford the resources that are out there provided by the government. But once you give them over to the government to be able to provide those resources, you’re giving up control. You’re saying, “Okay, now they’re yours. You control what they do, what they’re learning and how they’re progressing,” and again, I mean I know that there are some fantastic teachers out there and therapists and those people who are helping these special needs children, but you’re still giving them control to those people.

You mentioned resources. Can you talk specifically about that? What are some of the resources, maybe some books and different resources that you can suggest to parents?

Faith:                            Sure. One of my favorites is Homeschooling Children with Special Needs, by Sharon Hensley. It’s an oldie but a goodie, and I always tell parents if you’re going to be homeschooling a child with special needs you, this is one book you have to have. It’s very encouraging but very practical, and chock full of resources.

Yvette:                         Okay.

Listen to Zan Tyler on the Schoolhouse Rocked Podcast

Faith:                            That would be first. I also really encourage families to get Zan Tyler’s book The Seven Tools for Cultivating Your Child’s Potential.

Faith:                            It’s also really encouraging and practical. And then Cheryl Swope, if you’re familiar with her, with Memoria Press, she has a book called A Beautiful Education for Any Childand Cheryl has homeschooled her daughter who’s on the autism spectrum, but also Sharon Hensley’s daughter is on the autism spectrum. They’re both homeschooling moms. So those would be some practical resources to help and for encouragement.

Yvette:                         Okay. What else is there? Because I know for myself, and especially if we’re talking to a mom who is, maybe she’s got several kids and one or more of her children have special needs and she’s exhausted, and the thought of picking up three big books that are going to be fantastic for her to read through and dig into is just a little bit overwhelming. I know that you’re there and that’s part of your job at HSLDA is to, like you said before, come alongside those parents and encourage them and help walk them through, and that’s what you do in your position, correct? And let me ask you this. As a member of HSLDA, if someone’s a member, do they have access to you to be able to do that at any time or is that an extra service that they have to pay for? How does that work?

Faith:                            Right, so HSLDA has a small membership fee. It’s annual and that gives people access 24/7 to the attorneys. But it also gives them access to any of the educational consultants. We have toddlers to tweens, consultants for early years and high school, and then the special needs ladies. And so people can email or call. It’s not an extra fee, it’s included.

Yvette:                         Great.

Faith:                            Some of the other services they get are free transcript review or in our department, the special needs consultants … let’s say a family gets their child assessed. They get diagnostic testing done by a psychologist or diagnosing professional, and they get this lovely report and a label or a diagnosis and scores, but oftentimes, it’s not practical in terms of now what do I do, what curriculum do I use, how do I teach this child? And so that’s another thing that we’ll do is review reports for families and help to make recommendations and curricula suggestions that’s specific to their child.

Yvette:                         Which is fantastic because how many other places can you go and get that and have people be able to help you figure out what specifically you need for your child?

Faith:                            And they’d have to pay, you’d have to pay a private educational consultant to help with that. And then we do have a database of private homeschool-friendly professionals from across the nation. They’ve all come recommended to us by other homeschooling families and they’ve all been vetted and screened, and so members can access that. So let’s say they need to find somebody that does ABA therapy for a child with autism. They can search the database by their ZIP code and know what type of professional or service that they’re looking for. Or maybe it’s just a math tutor, so that continues to grow. We’ve built that over the last 20 years and it continues to grow.

So that’s another thing that we offer, ways to support families, but you know there are more and more organizations, and their state homeschool associations usually have somebody on staff that’s the special needs point person. More and more state organizations are having support groups specifically for special needs or special conferences. Florida does one, FPEA, they do a special needs conference. Midwest Parent Home Educators, they do one.

Yvette:                         Okay.

Faith:                            So, more and more state orgs are starting those. And then you may not be familiar with Peggy Ployhar.

Yvette:                         I am, yes. Yeah, we actually interviewed her for The Schoolhouse Rocked Podcast. It’s been several months, but It was a great show. She does SPED Homeschool.

Faith:                            Yes, SPED Homeschool. And so that’s great. You know parents can find online support, be it a Facebook support group like homeschooling with dyslexia or homeschooling kids with Down’s syndrome. So your online support groups are great, but obviously it’s best if you can have somebody that, “Let’s have coffee or should I come over and help me?”

And we can talk to people on the phone and help by email. But I always tell parents if you can definitely count on us, but there’s nothing like having somebody there face-to-face close by to walk the journey with you. That’s why it’s just so important for there to be support groups for parents who are homeschooling and specifically for special needs.

Yvette:                         Yes, I know that it can be a very lonely place to be, especially if you … a lot of people are parts of different communities and co-ops and things like that with homeschooling, and if you have a child who has, especially if you have one that has very severe special needs, it can be very difficult to find your place in those different groups and co-ops and, and so I know that it’s so important, and I know Peggy Player talks about this, about finding your tribe. Find other people who you can connect with, and hopefully someone like you said that you can and have coffee with in a coffee shop or be able to just meet up with in person.

But that’s not always possible. And so having other online groups and people that you can actually connect with, even if they don’t live close by, is just as important. But I will say also, and this goes for everything, even with co-ops, oftentimes people will say, “Well, there is nothing in my area that offers assistance or companionship for somebody who’s in my situation.” Well, start one, maybe. Maybe God is calling you to start that for your area because I can almost guarantee there’s someone else out there in your area who’s in the same boat as you, and you just need to be introduced to one another.

And so sometimes it’s just putting yourself out there and saying, “Hey, I have a special needs child. Does anyone else out here have one? Let’s talk. Let’s get together. Let’s get our kids together.” And that can form such beautiful relationships between parents, and I think that that’s really important. We have just a couple of more minutes left, and so I want to do two last things really quickly. Can you talk very quickly about how to accommodate special needs students at home? And then I would love for you to just give an encouragement to parents. So how would, how can you best accommodate them?

Faith:                            Sure. I mean, you can do things like frequent breaks and let them move while they’re learning. Learning doesn’t have to be in a table. I always tell parents, for kids with dysgraphia, they can do oral narration or dictation and you can act as scribe, or you can use assistive of technology like Dragon Dictate or Co-Writer. We have lists of assistive technology and software tools that we’ll share with parents. Sometimes it’s as simple as, rather than having the child work in the workbook, we’re just going to pull out a few problems. We’re not going to do the whole worksheet or I’m going to cut the worksheet in half. We’re going to do it on a white board or taking a big notebook and turning it sideways and giving them the paper or the page that they’re writing on. So it’s more of a slant board surface. Don’t be afraid to cut up your workbooks. Make them into something else. Flip books or sorting the pictures in the workbook instead of phonics workbook page, for instance, where the child looks at the picture and has to write the first sound or the middle sound or the end sound. And if writing’s hard, then cut out the pictures and have them sort them on a mat by the sound and glue them down or something like that.

So, we can modify materials, we can modify the expectations, the pace of the lesson, and give them assistive technology. Audio books is a great way to help students take in content and also help them be independent so mom and dad aren’t reading everything to them. Those are some, or having them circle answers or indicate answers and then the parent can bubble in if it’s a bubble sheet for standardized testing.

Yvette:                         So many great ideas! It sounds like you have a whole bucket full of ways that you can help parents figure out how to bring their kids home and school them. What would be your one last encouragement to parents who have children with special needs?

Faith:                            Well, don’t go it alone. Like you said, try to find support. Tap into national charitable organizations, and like you said, put yourself out there. Know that you’re not alone. You might feel alone, but I just want to encourage you that you’re not. All of us as homeschool moms, we all have bad days and we all struggle. And there are days where there’s tears, whether it’s our kids or it’s us, right? Now we have, we have great days, too. And that homeschooling really truly is an individualized plan of education. And it can really be an excellent line. So you may feel alone, but you’re not. And we’re here to help you. And I would love to help.

Yvette:                         That is fantastic. And like we say all the time on the podcast, God will give you everything that you need to accomplish what He’s called you to. So, if He’s calling you to keep your kids at home, He’s going to equip you with everything that you need in order to do it well. So where can people find out more about you?

Faith:                            They can go to HSLDA’s websiteand we have a quick navigation tab. It’s teaching my kids and if they click on that, they’ll see high school, early years, then a struggling learner page. So HSLDA.org, Teaching My Kids tab, or they can go to our Facebook page, HSLDA’s Educational Consultants. If you want to find me personally on Facebook, you can find me at Faith-Filled Homeschooling. SPED Homeschool, too, because now I’m serving on the board with Peggy.

Yvette:                         That is so great. That’s such a beautiful organization, and I love that so many of you are coming together and just linking arms to help parents across the world with special needs children. So thank you so much, Faith, for what you do. Thank you for your dedication to encouraging parents and to helping them just stay the course of homeschooling because it’s such an important and beautiful thing. So we appreciate all that you do and we appreciate all that HSLDA does. So, thank you for your time today and for speaking with me.

Recommended Resources:

Homeschooling Children with Special Needs, by Sharon Hensley

7 Tools for Cultivating Your Child’s Potential, by Zan Tyler

A Beautiful Education for any Child, by Cheryl Swope

Homeschooling Your Struggling Learner, by Kathy Kuhl

Encouraging your Child, by Kathy Kuhl

HSLDA membership

SPED Homeschool

Listen to more on this topic from Peggy Ployhar of SPED Homeschool

Connect with Faith:

HSDLA Education Consultants Facebook Page

Faith Filled homeschooling

Photo by Anna Kolosyuk on Unsplash

Photo by Samuel Zeller on Unsplash

The Fight for Homeschool Freedom

“We have got to educate people, as to what freedom and liberty is all about, what the constitution is all about, parental rights, and who our kids belong to. That’s very elementary. Socialism and Marxism would have us believe our kids belong to the government.” – Zan Tyler

While we were at the Firmly Planted Homeschool Resource Center, in Vancouver, Washington to finish filming interviews for Schoolhouse Rocked, homeschool pioneer, Zan Tyler stopped by for a surprise visit. Zan was instrumental in the fight to make homeschooling legal in South Carolina, in the early 1980s. She was in Oregon to speak at the Oregon Christian Home Education Association Network (OCEANetwork) homeschool conference, in Albany, Oregon and wanted to visit Heidi St. John and get a tour of the homeschool resource center. Because her story of the legal battles and persecution that she endured to pave the way for homeschooling families in her state provided such important historical perspective and cautionary advice, we didn’t want to miss the opportunity to interview her for the movie and for the podcast.

Zan Tyler (right), Heidi St. John (center, and Yvette Hampton at the Firmly Planted Homeschool Resource Center

Following her dramatic battle for the right to homeschool her children, Zan went on to teach them through graduation and all three of them attended college on a variety of scholarships. Gaining resolve during her battle, she went on to fight for other homeschooling families in South Carolina and across the United States, founding the South Carolina Association of Independent Home Schools in 1990, Speaking at homeschool conventions around the world, and writing several books, including Seven Tools for Cultivating Your Child’s Potential and the forward for Heidi St. John’s Busy Homeschool Mom’s Guide to Daylight: Managing Your Days Through the Homeschool Years. She has also worked to develop Bible-bases homeschool resources as the director of Apologia Press. Here is her story.

Yvette Hampton:           Hey everyone, this is Yvette, and we are back with the Schoolhouse Rocked Podcast. This is a really fun one, because we are actually on the set filming for Schoolhouse Rocked the movie. It’s so neat to see how the Lord provides just different guests and people for the movie and for the podcast as well.

You are going to love my guest today, her name is Zan Tyler. She is just a sweet, sweet homeschool mom whose kids are grown now. She has an amazing story and I know you are going to be so encouraged by what God has done in her family and through her family, for the homeschool world.

Listen to Zan Tyler on the Schoolhouse Rocked Podcast (7-30-2019 episode)

So Zan, welcome. I am really excited to talk to you today!

Zan:                              Oh, thank you, Yvette. It’s great to be here.

Yvette:                         Thank you. Tell us a little bit about you and your family.

Zan:                              Well, we have three grown kids, six grandchildren, and we homeschooled for 21 years, from 1984 to 2005, and homeschooled each of the kids from kindergarten through high school.

Yvette:                         So that was back in the day.

Zan:                              That was back in the day for sure.

Yvette:                         You are truly considered, in the homeschool world, one of the pioneers, who really got homeschooling kind of off the ground, and you are very instrumental in homeschooling becoming legal. Not just your state of South Carolina, but in many states, in addition to that. So, let’s talk about that, because there’s so much to tell in your story. Tell us, kind of from the beginning, how this whole story unfolded for you.

“When she said the word homeschool, I just felt like the walls of her little home at Columbia Bible College were closing in on me. I thought, ‘Lord, if you will just get me out of here, I never want to hear the word homeschool again.’ I just thought it was the strangest thing I had ever heard. Our family was extroverts, and I just couldn’t imagine.”

Zan:                              Well, it was 1984, which I just always think is so George Orwellian, and my oldest son was in kindergarten. He was very bright and gifted, but not reading. He was the only one in this little kindergarten of eight that wasn’t reading. So I was looking for answers, because I had no educational background. I wasn’t sure if it was a problem, or what he was going through.

A friend of mine recommended that we hold him back a year. That was normal for boys, they needed a little more time to mature. But another friend of mine, she and her husband were getting their masters degrees at Columbia Bible College, getting ready to go to the mission field said, “Zan, I taught in the public schools for many years before I had Nat and I’m going to homeschool, and I think you should homeschool Ty.”

This transcript is generously provided by MakeCrate. MakeCrate provides your homeschooler with the STEM skills they need for the future! Fun, hands-on electronics kits paired with an online learning platform teach your middle or high schooler engineering and coding fundamentals right at home! No technical expertise is required. Order your MakeCrate today at MakeCrate.Club/SR. 

You know the scene from Star Wars, where the walls – it’s really a trash compactor – and they start closing in? When she said the word homeschool, I just felt like the walls of her little home at Columbia Bible College were closing in on me. I thought, “Lord, if you will just get me out of here, I never want to hear the word homeschool again.” I just thought it was the strangest thing I had ever heard. Our family was extroverts, and I just couldn’t imagine.

But she gave me a book, Homegrown Kids by Dr. Moore. I took home that book, and all the way home I’m telling the Lord, “Well, I’m never going to homeschool.” I get home and I start reading that book, more as a courtesy from my friend than anything else, and it was like the Holy Spirit was just wooing me, and softening my heart, and showing me what a glorious way to educate homeschooling really is.

Watch Zan Tyler’s full interview for Schoolhouse Rocked at our Backstage Pass members website.

The only problem was, this was 1984, and we didn’t know one person in the world who homeschooled. There were no organizations, no HSLDA. I think it had actually started on the West Coast, but we certainly didn’t know of them on the East Coast. No state organizations, no support groups, no, nobody. So I really had nobody to turn to.

I used to walk in the morning early and pray and listen to the Bible on my Walkman, and I really just felt like the Lord was saying, “Okay, I really want you to homeschool your boys.” I just remember saying, “No, I just can’t do this.” So I ran inside. We went to the public school district in our area, I showed them the testing that Ty should be held back a year, even though he was six, and they said, “Okay.” That was that, and I thought that was the end of the story.

Until others, people in the school district, were getting their orientation packets for kindergarten and I didn’t get one. I called the school superintendent, he said, “You can’t put your first grader in our kindergarten program. We’ve put him in first grade.” I said, “Well, private schools are filled at this point, I have no choice.” He said, “Well, I’m sorry, you cannot do this.”

So, I called my old high school principal, who is now associate superintendent of instruction in the district, and just asked him to write a note to hold Ty back. He said, “Well, Zan, I just can’t do that.” Which, they did those kinds of things all the time. I said, “Well, I guess I’m just going to have to homeschool Ty.” It was a threat, it was my trump card. He said, “Oh, the school district’s gotten so lenient with that kind of thing.”

Later I found out they had approved one person in the history of the district, and she was a certified teacher. I had been an economics major in college. I had planned to go to law school, until Joe proposed and we got married and had children instead. I mean, I did not have the educational background they were looking for. So we had to hire an attorney just to find out what the law was. The local school district, nor the State Department of Education, would give us the law. There’s no internet, no Google, no organizations, no other way to find it out.

So, we hired him, we submitted our application. It’s about, oh, I mean, it was about five inches thick, everything they wanted from me at that point, and they denied my application. So we had to call our attorney again. He said, “Oh, now you appeal to the state board. They will deny you, they will uphold whatever the local school board did.” I said, “What then?” He said, “You’ll end up in family court.” I said, “What then?” He said, “Well, I don’t know, honey.”

“He looked at me and he said, ‘Well, if you continue down this path, Zan, I’ll have you put in jail for truancy.’ So, that was sort of the watershed moment for me. I said, ‘Well, then you’ll just have to put me in jail.'”

Zan Tyler, a homeschooling pioneer

So, I’m telling the Lord, “I told you this was not a good idea.” So, in the middle of all of this, I had a thought. The State Superintendent of Education had actually observed my mother’s classroom. She was a fourth grade teacher when he was getting his PhD. I was in the fourth grade, so I saw him every day after school for several months. I called Dr. Williams, said, “Dr. Williams, this is Zan Tyler. I’m Sybil Peter’s daughter. I have a problem, can I come see you?”

So, I went up there, and just explained my predicament, all I wanted to do is hold Ty back a year. The school district said, yes, then they said no. Private schools were filled, and they denied my application to homeschool. What am I going to do? He looked at me and he said, “Well, if you continue down this path, Zan, I’ll have you put in jail for truancy.” So, that was sort of the watershed moment for me. I said, “Well, then you’ll just have to put me in jail.”

Yvette:                         Which at that point, I would say most parents would probably just say, “Okay.” They would throw their hands up, give up and say, “All right.”

Zan:                              You know, I think that was just when the Lord took over for me. There’s the verse in Acts that says, “Don’t fear when you’re brought before governors, because I’ll tell you what to say.” It was really an out of body experience, because I said, “Then Dr. Williams, you’ll have to put me in jail.” I’m thinking, “Who just said that?” It was really like an out of body experience. But I knew the Lord had been calling me, and in that moment he, I don’t know exactly how to explain it, but he confirmed that to me.

Yvette:                         It’s so neat to have just a piece of God when he asks us to do everything. We’ve talked a whole lot about this on the podcast, is that when God calls you to something, he’s going to provide everything that you need, and he is going to pave the way for you. Whether it’s homeschooling, or, you know, a new job, or a move across the country. Whatever it is, he’s going to provide the way, and he’s going to pave that road.

So I love that you were just obedient and you were willing to listen to what God was telling you, because you have, now since then, impacted so many families. So, continue on. Well, let me ask you this first. How did your husband, Joe, how did he respond to this whole idea of homeschooling? Was he all in favor of it? Was he a little resistant? What was his response?

Zan:                              Well, I’ll tell you now that Joe does a workshop called, You Want to What? Confessions of a Reluctant Homeschool Dad. So, we’ve always had a great marriage. Joe’s a great communicator, and so we could always talk. Basically what he said to me was, “I know how much you love the Lord, and I know how much you love the kids. So I totally trust you, but I think this is the craziest thing we’ve ever done.”

He finally said, “Well, if it’s numbers and colors, you can’t mess up a kid too much in kindergarten.” Then we laughed, because low and behold Ty was color blind, and we didn’t know it yet. I mean, he was very supportive of me, he just thought the idea of homeschooling was nuts.

Yvette:                         So what was his response when you started to get into a little bit of legal trouble?

Zan:                              You know, then we were just all in it together.

Yvette:                         Which is how it should be.

Zan:                              Yes, yes. So, he tons of pizza. I should say this, no man should have to eat as much pizza during those early years of homeschooling as Joe did.

Yvette:                         Yep. You are one busy mama.

Zan:                              Yeah.

Yvette:                         So, how did the rest of the story transpire from there?

Zan:                              Well, it was interesting, because being the brave noble person I was, we had decided not to tell either set of parents we were going to homeschool. Joe said, “You know, you’re going to have to tell them at some point, it’s kind of like being pregnant. People will recognize, at some point, that something is going on.” I said, “Well, when the time comes, I’ll talk about it.” I just had no more emotional bandwidth.

So, when I was threatened with jail, then that forced the conversation, because my parents were very involved in the whole fabric of Columbia. Not social life, but just community life. Dad was, in addition to his profession and being a lawyer, he was chairman of the board of the Baptist hospital system. I knew that the newspapers would not say, “P on homeschool mothers and Tyler goes to jail.” It would say, “John Peter’s daughter goes to jail.”

I knew I needed to tell them. So, I go by to tell them, and I hold it together, “Mom, dad, I’m going to homeschool Ty.” Of course, they don’t know what it is, I barely know what it is. “I’ve been threatened with jail, and my hearing is on Tuesday. I didn’t want you to read about it in the newspaper.” Then I just lost it. I was hysterical, and I left. My daddy, we’ve always been so close, he just went to be with the Lord. But he was just so mad I had been treated that way.

As God, in his very kind of providence would have it, he was speaking at a hospital function the next night with Nancy Thurman, who was the wife of Senator Strom Thurmond, who was a legend in South Carolina politics, served in the Senate for 50 or so years. I had worked for him when I was in high school. It was the first year of the 18 year old vote, and I was female to boot. So I did television commercials with him and toured the state with fundraisers with him and his team. So I knew him, and I had called his office and gotten no response.

Dad said to Mrs. Thurman that night, “Zan needs help from the Senator now.” So she called his chief of staff who said, “We’ll overnight a letter to Charlie Williams, the State Superintendent of Education, telling him to approve the program.” But the next day we got a call from his chief of staff saying that the Senator was actually going to fly down and meet personally with Charlie Williams, who was the State Superintendent of Education.

So, when Senator Thurmond, the legend, walks in and tells Dr. Williams, “Her program is legal, we’ve looked into it, you need to approve it.” Then everything changed. So, the threats of jail averted, and the State Board approved my program. We homeschooled that first year. It was still very tough, we had policemen riding up and down our streets of a very quiet neighborhood. We assumed to make sure that we were inside having school and at home, and we had threatening phone calls, and neighbors.

Yvette:                         From the school board?

Zan:                              Well, you know, at first, we didn’t know. This is before caller ID and cell phones and all of this. So BellSouth had just come out with this very expensive callback system, you could see who called you. I told Joe, I said, “I want to pay for this.” We had no money at this point, legal fees and all. He said, “Okay, you’re paranoid, but we’ll do it.” It was school districts, and it was not just my own. It was other school districts in the state calling me, wanting personal information, seeing if I answered the phone.

It was crazy. But that year, our goal was just to get Ty ready for first grade. But the things that we saw happening in our home, even with all the pressure, the legal pressure outside of the home, there was just this, not magic, that’s the wrong word, but this just incredible depth building in our home that we had never had before, even though I was a stay at home mother up until that point.

So, our vision for homeschooling began to grow a little bit, and legal threats were starting to pour in, and the State Department of Education was getting ready to promulgate very negative regulations. So, it just grew into an eight year struggle, really, or battle, where for eight years our family was, either in court or in the legislature, fighting for good homeschool laws in South Carolina.

Yvette:                         At that point you knew you weren’t just fighting for yourself; you were fighting for others who would come into homeschooling.

Zan:                              Yes, that’s right.

Yvette:                         Through that time, did you start to meet other families who were homeschooling?

Zan:                              Yes, yes. I remember we went to the first conference in Atlanta, and I think there were seven families from South Carolina there. Which I had no idea, we were delighted to see seven. But everybody was so nervous, nobody would give out their phone numbers or their last names, because we were so afraid that there was somebody from the government there. They were scary times.

But during that first year, Joe and I began to keep a database of people who were starting to call us then from all over the country, it was kind of strange. It was think tanks and attorneys, and people looking to move to South Carolina, who may have already started homeschooling in another state where there was no threat. So, we just started collecting names of people who had heard of homeschooling. We weren’t necessarily looking for homeschoolers, just people who had heard of it.

So we started growing this database, which came in handy then, in December of 1985, a year later, when we got the information that the State Department was getting ready to promulgate the regulations that would require teaching parents, and to have a college degree, and only use state-approved tax. So that gave us a little bit of list to begin building that grassroots movement with.

Yvette:                         So how did homeschooling change your family?

Zan:                              Oh, my goodness, I feel like Shakespeare, “let me count the ways.” It just, this closeness. We were close to begin with, I can’t explain it. Just a deeper intimacy. It made the kids closer. The most dramatic change for me is I began to notice my boys’ spiritual gifts. There was no time for that kind of observation before, but even though they were young, I believe that the Lord gave me insight into things that the boys were capable of spiritually, and the way they thought.

For instance, we had been praying, just for our neighbors, that we’d have a chance to witness. One day, during our first few weeks of homeschooling, they were out playing and I called them in, they were riding their bikes in the driveway, and he didn’t come. I said, “Ty, honey, you have to obey me the first time, or homeschooling is not going to work.” He said, “Well, mom, did you see that little boy on the bicycle?” He said, “We’ve been sharing Jesus. I’d never seen him in our neighborhood. I was afraid I’d never see him again, and I just needed to tell him about Jesus.”

Yvette:                         Wow.

Zan:                              It was through instances of being together so much, that I began to see his heart to really share the Gospel, even as a young little boy. Then my other son, who is now an attorney, was always very thoughtful. When Joe and I went to our first homeschool conference, in Atlanta. Conference, I use that word very lightly, there were maybe 60 people there from 10 states or five states or something. My sister took John and Ty up to Stone Mountain, and they were six and four. We’d been learning the children’s catechism, and they found this footprint that looked like a huge footprint in the mountain, and Ty said, “John, look at this. This is so big, it must be God’s.” Four year old little John says, “Ty, God is a spirit and have not a body like man.”

Oh, my goodness! So, I began to see their spiritual depth really blossom. That has always been one of the greatest parts of homeschooling to me, is that we can prepare our kids to take their place in the world, not just academically gifted and other gifts, but their spiritual gifts. The church just needs mature believers now, people who can speak truth.

Yvette:                         Yeah, that’s right. So, kind of take us down the road of what homeschooling looked like. You say you went to these conventions, and there were about 60 people there, you know, to what it is today. Because now you go and you’ve got 6,000, 7,000 people or more at some conventions. It has changed dramatically, obviously.

It’s really interesting, because we’re going into our ninth year of homeschooling, but when we came into homeschooling nine years ago, it was very similar to what it is now. It was a very acceptable culture, it’s not awkward for us to go to the grocery store in the middle of the day. When people say, you know, “Oh, are you off of school today?” My girls say, “No, we’re homeschooled.” Then typically people will respond with, “Oh, wow, that’s great. I wish I could homeschool, or, you know, my sister homeschools, or my daughter home schools.” I mean, everybody knows somebody who homeschools.

Zan:                              Yes, that’s right.

Yvette:                         But obviously, it wasn’t that way for you.

Zan:                              That’s right.

Yvette:                         So, take us through what it was like for you in those beginning years, and other families, to what homeschooling has become today.

Zan:                              I have such a vivid memory of having homeschooled for about six months, and being in tears one morning during my quiet time, just saying, “Lord, remember me, this person you made so extroverted? I now have no friends.” There were people in the neighborhood who would no longer speak to us, people in our church who were suspicious. I mean, this was 1984, and like I said, when I said we knew nobody when we started, we knew nobody when we started. So, there was just no support and nobody for the kids to share that experience with.

Now, as the year progressed and we went into the second year, then we found friends. I mean, it wasn’t unusual for us to drive to Greenville to see another homeschool family, which was 100 miles away, or Charleston. Then we began to develop a few friends and a little bit of a community. I will say this, that the community that developed was very, very close. Then when we were threatened in 1985, with those regulations from the State Department, we started pulling the group together and sending mailings out.

Then somebody gave us an organization that had already the 501(c)(3) status they weren’t using anymore. We took that over and then formed the first homeschooling organization in South Carolina. So, it was definitely hard. It was just hard. But we knew the Lord had called us, and then to watch it grow step by step. We had the first public hearing in South Carolina in 1986, and we actually had about 400 people show up for that, which was really amazing. We had no idea. We just sent out this blind list, this list we had been mailing, and we had all these people show up. It was pretty amazing. That was a ton of people.

Yvette:                         That is a lot, because that’s before the days of even email-

Zan:                              That’s right, oh, no, email, no. That was the days before fax. It was by phone or mail. So, it was very interesting. So, it was the Lord, and then eventually we started going to the National Leadership Conference. It was people from a lot of other states who had … everybody was going through their own set of circumstances. Some people were very free, like in Georgia or North Carolina, other people were like us in South Carolina, where we were very threatened, and it was very hard. But that was our peer group, and that sort of was what the Lord gave us, just to keep us going, and that fellowship we needed to keep going.

I can remember the first time Joe and I were asked to go to Japan to speak at a conference there, and it wasn’t for expats, it was for Japanese. I sat on the plane, and all of a sudden I just started crying, because I looked at Joe and I said, “You remember when we first started homeschooling? All people wanted to do was shut me up. You know, make her be quiet, stop talking about this, go away.” The fact that somebody was paying us to fly halfway across the world to talk to them about homeschooling, it was just overwhelming.

It’s one of those moments that will just always be emblazoned in my mind. But it was like a revival movement, the Lord just kept raising people up and up and up, and it got bigger and bigger, and it was this grassroots ground swell. That was one reason you know it’s really the Holy Spirit, because there’s no other explanation for it.

Yvette:                         Yeah. So, you’ve been through the whole process of helping to make it legal. Where do you see homeschooling going in the future? Do you see that our freedoms are in jeopardy at all? Or do you think that we will be able to continue on with our freedom? And how can people make sure that our freedom stays?

Zan:                              Joe always says, “It’s not that the grass is greener on the other side, it’s the grass is greenest where you water it and fertilize it.” So we shouldn’t ever take our marriages for granted, we should never take our freedom for granted. I know what it’s like to be an innocent person who was threatened legally. I will tell you that is not fun. I never want another mother to go through what we went through. It was horrible. Wandering at night if somebody was going to take my kids, if a neighbor was going to turn us in to the Department of Social Services for something. It was extremely stressful.

So, my love for freedom is very, not guarded, but it’s in the context of knowing we can lose it, and knowing what that feels like. Ronald Reagan said, “It only takes a generation to lose our freedom.” Then there’s the quote, “All we need to lose our freedom is … for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing.” So I think it’s very easy to become complacent, when it seems so easy.

But we need to remember we have enemies, whether it’s the National Education Association or the School Administrators Association. There are people out there who think that the fact that we can homeschool our children is the worst thing that has ever happened to the culture. We think it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to the culture.

Yvette:                         Right, of course, but they want control over our children.

Zan:                              We were talking earlier today about this, I was speaking at a leadership forum sponsored by Clemson University in South Carolina, but this was the education segment, I was the homeschool spokesman. After it was over, this woman asked me, she said, “Don’t you feel guilty for homeschooling?” I said, “Well, I have felt a lot of emotions over homeschooling, but guilt is not one of them, why?” She said, “Because you’ve robbed the school district of all the money the state would have given them for your children, you’ve robbed the school district of kids who probably would have good test scores, because you’ve also robbed the school district of involved parents, all of these things which we need.”

So I got real quiet, and I said, “Well, who do you think my kids belong to?” Well, she had no answer. So I read her this, this shows what my life was like. I used to travel with this in my purse, I had no idea what I’m going to talk about at this day. So I read her this statement, I’m going to read it to you, just because this is where my life was.

“The fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this union repose excludes any general power of the state to standardize his children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only. The child is not the mere creature of the state. Those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.”

So she looked at me like, “Where did you get that right wing Christian propaganda?” She said, “Where did you get that?” I said, “From the United States Supreme Court, Pierce vs Society of Sisters, 1925.” I remember thinking then here is the problem with our society, nobody knows anymore that children don’t belong to the state. When you have to tell an audience that the child is not the mere creature of the state, and that is news to them, we are in trouble as a culture.

So, we have got to educate people, as to what freedom and liberty is all about, what the constitution is all about, parental rights, and who our kids belong to. That’s very elementary. Socialism and Marxism would have us believe our kids belong to the government.

Yvette:                         That’s right, that’s right. We have a couple minutes left. In these last few minutes I would love for you to talk about, because I know you’ve been very involved in your state organization. How can people get involved in their own state organization, or in, you know, the United States as a whole, to keep the freedoms that we have for homeschooling? And why do these state organizations even exist?

“The state organizations have done the homeschooling community such a great service in watching each state, legislature by legislature, and knowing where the threats come up. So, I would invite and encourage every homeschooler to join their state group, and their state group will be the legislative watchdog. Then go to your state day at the capitol. Most states have that, some states don’t. Start one if you don’t. I would tell you to get to know your legislator and your state Senator, and that is not hard to do, they want to know you as a constituent.”

Zan:                              Well, the state organizations have done the homeschooling community such a great service in watching each state, legislature by legislature, and knowing where the threats come up. So, I would invite and encourage every homeschooler to join their state group, and their state group will be the legislative watchdog. Then go to your state day at the capitol. Most states have that, some states don’t. Start one if you don’t. I would tell you to get to know your legislator and your state Senator, and that is not hard to do, they want to know you as a constituent.

Homeschooled kids are the best thing we have going for us, because they’re polite and articulate, and well-educated. It’s like one representative said to me, “Zan, now that I see the artwork, I want to know the artist.” So, we need to do that, we need to take our kids with us to vote, we need to get them involved with pro-life, pro-family candidates. My boys started working campaigns with me when they were little, we would hold out signs in the rain. You know, politics is not glamorous, but it is really necessary.

Then, you know, during the presidential election, every presidential election, we would have a blank map of the states, and we would color a state red if it went to the Republican candidate, blue if it went to the Democrat, and we’d mark in the number of electoral votes. So, explain to your kids the electoral college, there’s a great movement afoot to get rid of it. It would destroy our Republican form of government. So I would just say be involved. If it’s uncomfortable, just decide you’re going to live out of your comfort zone.

Heidi’s podcast is a great podcast. She keeps us up politically with what’s going on, and your state organization will do that. Join HSLDA as well, they’ve been a great safeguard for homeschooling parents.

Yvette:                         Yeah, absolutely. Yes, you’re right. Heidi St. John, her podcast, the Heidi St. John Podcastis excellent. She often talks about just things that are going on in the culture. I get all my news from her.

Zan:                              Yeah, that’s fabulous.

Yvette:                         I listen to it every day. But, yes, people can actually go to the Schoolhouse Rockedwebsite,and there’s a dropdown that talks about state organizations, and people can easily find their own state organization on there. So you don’t even have to go anywhere else, you just go straight to the Schoolhouse Rocked website.

Zan, thank you. Thank you for everything you’ve done, everything that you and your family have sacrificed for the freedoms that we enjoy today as homeschoolers. You are a homeschool legend, and I am so excited to be sitting here with you. So thank you for your time today.

Zan:                              It has been my privilege. Thank you so much.

You can find out more about Zan Tyler at ZanTyler.com.

Read Zan’s book, Seven Tools for Cultivating Your Child’s Potential

Read Heidi St. John’s book, Busy Homeschool Mom’s Guide to Daylight: Managing Your Days Through the Homeschool Years

Photo by vivek kumar on Unsplash

Photo by Garritt Hampton

 

 

Motivating Your Homeschooler

“I can assure you that all of those things that seem super important, like, “did you get through the math book by the end of May?”, actually, in the big picture, are not all that important. I would say some of the least important part about growing up is the academic side. The most important part is the adventures, and the breadth of knowledge and experience and of course above all the relationships and the spiritual enrichment, that is so much more easily facilitated when you’ve got the time and space and priority to do that.”

Yvette Hampton:           Hey everyone, I am so excited about our guest today. Before we started the Schoolhouse Rocked podcast, we sent out a question to our Schoolhouse Rocked followers and just said, “Hey, we’re starting this podcast. Who do you want to hear on the podcast? What guest do you want, and what do you want us to talk about?” Of course, many of you wrote in and said, “Andrew Pudewa.” We saw his name over and over again, and so many of you are very excited about hearing him and wanted to hear more of him because those of you who have heard him speak know that he is just full of wisdom and knowledge and insight when it comes to homeschooling and family and education.

Yvette:                         We, of course, are really excited to have him as part of the Schoolhouse Rocked cast. Welcome, Andrew. We are really excited to have you on today.

Andrew Pudewa:          Hey Yvette, it is great to be with you. Thanks for the invite.

Yvette:                         Sure. Tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and your family.

Listen to this interview with Andrew Pudewa on the Schoolhouse Rocked Podcast. (7/16/2019 Episode)

Andrew:                       Well, my wife and I have homeschooled all of our children. The oldest now is 39, and the youngest just got married at 18. That’s seven kids, six married, 11 grandchildren. I’ve been at this teaching business for a little over 30 years and the time has flown by. I have a little company called the Institute for Excellence in Writing. We publish video material as well as books and activity types of curriculum to help students with language arts, really to help teachers and homeschool parents help kids learn how to write better, but really, it encompasses all of the language arts, listening, speaking, reading, and writing.

Then of course, the result of good listening, speaking, reading and writing is better thinking, so a little tagline on our company. If you’re go to our website, iew.com, you’d see our little tagline. It’s listen, speak, read, write, think. It’s a good role. I’ve been at it full time for close to 20 years now, working with homeschoolers all over the world. I had the great privilege and pleasure of going with my wife to Russia for the Global Home Education Conference in St. Petersburg in Moscow, Russia last May. Then I went on an undercover trip over to China, I won’t even say where, to do a three-day conference for expat homeschooling families who live in China. We came back, finished up the summer, and then in August went to New Zealand and did a six-city tour of New Zealand to serve the homeschoolers over there. I’m looking forward to when that movie is out and ready and everyone in the world can stream it and see it.

Yvette:                         Well, we’ll have to, of course, translate it into Chinese obviously.

Andrew:                       I’d go for Russian first only because homeschooling in Russia is it’s exploding. I mean, it is going to grow so rapidly over there.

Yvette:                         That is amazing.

Andrew:                       The government evidently is either neutral or supportive about homeschoolers in almost all places. There are classical conversations, programs, I think. Many dozens of them. There may be as many as a hundred CC communities now across the huge country of Russia, and that’s just going to grow.

This transcript is generously provided by MakeCrate. MakeCrate provides your homeschooler with the STEM skills they need for the future! Fun, hands-on electronics kits paired with an online learning platform teach your middle or high schooler engineering and coding fundamentals right at home! No technical expertise is required. Order your MakeCrate today at MakeCrate.Club/SR. 

Yvette:                         It’s been so encouraging to find out that when we started Schoolhouse Rocked, we, I think, had a very narrow vision of, “Well, this is for the United States because we were kind of in our little California bubble,” and that was what we knew. We didn’t realize that homeschooling is growing leaps and bounds across the entire world. It’s not just in America, and so it’s been really exciting and encouraging. Like you said, we really desire to get the movie out. We changed our focus. The movie is obviously filmed in the United States, and all of our cast members are from the U.S. but it has changed our focus to just say, “Wow, this is not just a movie that can change people’s hearts in the United States. It can change people’s hearts around the world.”

That is so exciting. I love that you’ve had the opportunity to go to all these different countries and talk about homeschooling. This is actually not the exact direction that I want the podcast interview to go because I have some questions for you, but can you tell us just in a nutshell what the flavor of homeschooling is? What are parents like in other parts of the country as you’ve gone there and talk to them about homeschooling?

Andrew:                       Well, I’ve been around a long time. I’ve been speaking at homeschool conferences really 20 years now, and so the demographic has changed, of course, as homeschooling has grown more and varied types of people have become interested in it. Well, I would say once upon a time, almost everyone was homeschooling for moral or religious reasons. Now, we’re meeting people who are coming into it through all different directions. Their primary reason may be academic. They just know they can do a better job teaching their kids one-on-one or three-on-one and in an individualized focus setting than any school and teacher no matter how good the teachers are just because of the nature of institutional education, again, people coming in from that side.

You’ve got people coming in with special needs and special circumstances saying, “this child has this thing going on”, and it could be health. It could be neurological. It could be some type of learning challenge. It could be giftedness. They’re just saying the schools are not equipped to maximize this child’s potential. I can do that better. They’re coming in on that side. Then there are other people that are just looking at the whole situation saying, “Well, there are so many things about that school I don’t like, and I can’t afford that option. And I’m not really sure that I want to homeschool, but I don’t see any better options.” I like that because they come in, and then hopefully, they begin to taste and see the goodness of the homeschool world and the culture and all the resources and opportunities that are available now that weren’t 20 years ago.

It truly is a case where I think more and more parents are realizing everyone homeschools. It’s just some people do it full time. Everyone has to teach their children at home. It’s just are you going to make that a primary part of your life, or are you going to do it on the side? We meet a lot of parents that are coming to conferences now saying, “Well, I don’t know. I don’t know if I can do this. Maybe I can, but I’m not sure I want to, but man, all the people here are so happy.”


Andrew Pudewa on School at Home

Yvette:                         Yes, and you see whole families together, which is really exciting. That’s one of my favorite parts of going to conventions is when you see mom and dad and kids walking around together and looking at curriculum and going to the different workshops. It’s really exciting just to see that dynamic of the entire family being together.

Andrew:                       Absolutely. The family is so under attack. In the western developed world all around the world, the family is under attack, so homeschooling seems to be on the vanguard of, “Let’s recapture. Let’s retain. Let’s rebuild. Let’s communicate to the world the great beauty of families functioning, learning, operating, growing together rather than being split apart by the busyness of life and technology. The institutions that can distract us.


Andrew Pudewa – Homeschooling Brings Growth

Yvette:                         I know for you, because you travel so much, you’re always on the road – I imagine it has allowed you to be able to have a really special kind of relationship with your kids because when you’re home, you’re able to be with them and instead of them being away at school. You actually get that time or got that time, because most of them are adults now. They’re all adults.

Andrew:                       It was a trade off because when you’re gone for three or four days, 30 weeks a year, that’s a lot of time to be gone. There’s mom feeling like having to do both sides of the parenting, but then when I’m home, I was always home. That was good. I could schedule classes and do things. Then a part of it, in our case because it was a family business rather than me working for other company, I would often take one or two kids with me. In the early days, I needed them. I needed their suitcase space to bring the books, I need them [inaudible 00:09:48] the booth.

Growing up in a family business, I think, it has its pluses and its challenges, but overall, I think all of them gained a lot of very practical, very memorable, positive and maybe a few bitter moments, but it certainly cultivated attitude of entrepreneurship that I can see in all of them now. They’re all grown up, and they’re all very entrepreneurial thinking, and a couple of them have started businesses on their own. It’s great to see. Great to see the… It’s wonderful, Yvette, to have adult children. You don’t have adult kids yet, do you?

Yvette:                         Not yet. Ours are still young.

Andrew:                       Well, one thing I would say to everyone who’s in that case of young children or in the thick of it with a teenager and a four-year-old all at the same time is it’s so great to have adult children because I can assure you that all of those things that seem super important, like, “did you get through the math book by the end of May?”, actually, in the big picture, are not all that important. I would say some of the least important part about growing up is the academic side. The most important part is the adventures, and the breadth of knowledge and experience and of course above all the relationships and the spiritual enrichment, that is so much more easily facilitated when you’ve got the time and space and priority to do that.

Although, it’s easy for us as homeschool parents to get caught up and worried about the academic side because we’re responsible for keeping the transcript and having grades and being sure that this kid is going to make it into college and get a good job someday. There’s that anxiety, so we’re always balancing that freedom along with that anxiety about academics.


Andrew Pudewa – Homeschooling is Efficient

Yvette:                         That’s a real struggle of course for homeschool moms. Our oldest is in seventh grade this year. I’m now starting to think, “Oh gosh, she’s going to be in high school in two years, and I have to start keeping real transcripts for her.” They’re seriously… I mean, there can be a lot of anxiety that goes along with that. Like you said, it’s not about just the academics. I mean, those are important but it’s so much more. School is so much more than just academics. It’s about character building and family and relationships and stuff like you said.

It’s so exciting, but that doesn’t always take away the questions that the moms have. It’s a big responsibility that we put on ourselves and that God gives to us when we choose to take on this role of home educating our children, because it is an important thing in so many areas. I mean, it’s their whole life that you’re holding in your hands. Only by the grace of God can we get this done effectively.

Andrew:                       That’s what you realize is they were God’s kids all along.

Yvette:                         That’s right.

Andrew:                       You’re just helping out doing their best. Could I put in a little plug for the HSLDA, the Homeschool Legal Defense Association?

Yvette:                         Sure. Absolutely.

Andrew:                       I’m a big supporter of HSLDA. They, of course, are strongly behind the support for global home education freedom. In the early days, people would join HSLDA because they thought, “Oh no, if social services comes banging on my door, if the truant officer calls, what would I do? I want this insurance,” so they would join HSLDA for that purpose. I believe that we’ve become a bit complacent in the homeschool communities because we haven’t had too many huge legal problems in most dates. You and I both homeschooled in California for a while and that’s a very homeschool friendly state.

I’m in Oklahoma now. It’s probably the most homeschool friendly state, and even the less homeschool friendly states, which I will not name by name – You out there who live there, you know where you are. We take for granted now the freedoms that we have to do this, but honestly, the Homeschool Legal Defense Association does so much more than provide “legal representation” insurance in case you have a problem. I would just encourage everyone to join the HSLDA, not because you think you might need their services, but because what they’re doing is a tremendously good work and that is holding every single agency or government or office that interfaces with homeschoolers accountable in subtle ways.

Not just, “Is it legal or not,” but do homeschool graduates have the same opportunities and rights? Is someone infringing on that by saying, “No, no, your school diploma doesn’t count.” Then of course they provide some wonderful services. In fact, as having kids going to high school, you might want to look into their transcript service because they have a great little service. It’s not very expensive, and it will help you to stay organized for this next decade of having kids go through high school and all that. I wish everyone would join the HSLDA, because more than any other organization that I know of, they are standing on the front line of the right of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their children.

I fear that right, while we may be taking it for granted, could be not only infringed, but actually cut in many cases very quickly without us even noticing it.

Yvette:                         I appreciate that, and you’re welcome, HSLDA, for that commercial! That was not planned, but I love that. You and I, last month, I think it was, we were at the HSLDA national leaders conference in Washington, D.C. We’ve been members of HSLDA for many, many years. I guess, this is our eighth year of membership with them. We’re now actually lifetime members because we figured we’re going to do this forever, so may as well just go for the lifetime. I really didn’t know all the things that they offered, and we’ve been members for a long time. There’s so much stuff on their website, but they really are a fantastic organization.

The freedom that they have fought for and the freedom that they continue to fight for and protect for homeschool families is incredible. Like you said, I think we do take for granted that we have this freedom to homeschool. When we started, we really didn’t know all of the backstories that had gone on in all… I mean, there were parents just like you and I who were regular homeschool parents, who were threatened in big ways for choosing to take their kids out of school and saying we’re going to home educate them. They fought long, and they fought hard, and they fought tough to get these freedoms for us today.

Most people don’t know about that. The other thing that I really had my eyes up into two were state organizations. They don’t fall under the leadership of HSLDA, but I know they work very closely sometimes with HSLDA, but on their own, they really work hard to protect their freedoms and their individual states and then they’re there for their own state families to encourage them and equip them and to keep their own freedoms for their own individual states. I think a lot of people… We’re actually going to be doing an interview later this week with Rebecca Kocsis. She’s one of the state representatives for Chia, which is in California.

We’re going to talk with her about state organizations. I agree. It’s so important to stand behind those people who are standing in front of us and keeping those walls broken down so that we can continue to homeschool our kids. Anyway, so I have a couple of questions. You and I could talk all day long. When we interviewed you for Schoolhouse Rocked, I remember, I think I might’ve asked you maybe four questions, and your interview was two and a half hours long. It was awesome, and it was funny we came away from there. We said, “Well, goodness gracious, how do we pull the gold out of this?”

The way we do that of course is we’ve got the Schoolhouse Rocked Backstage Pass, and we will at some point have your full interview up on there that people can view, but I do have a couple of questions for you. Like I said, we had people write in and ask specific questions, and they wanted to know some things. There are a couple that I thought you would be just great at answering because I know you talk a lot about motivation in the homeschool day. One mom wrote in. She said, “How do you motivate the daydreamer to buckle down and complete their assignments quickly but well so that they can have more free time to pursue their passions? We’ve tried everything and even a scaled back assignment will take all day because she has no drive to finish. Do we just have to nag?”

How would you answer that mom? Help her out.

Andrew:                       It’s hard to give a specific answer to a specific question without knowing a few more details, but I would talk about principles of motivation, which I have studied extensively and talked about and written about. What I have come to understand over these decades is that there’s really four forms of motivation. One, I would call intrinsic, so something has intrinsic relevancy, right? If something is relevant, meaningful, interesting, engaging, applicable, useful to some degree, it’s easier to learn. Wouldn’t you agree?

Yvette:                         Sure.

Andrew:                       If something is not interesting, applicable, meaningful, useful in some way, it’s harder to learn.

Yvette:                         Sure.

Andrew:                       This tangible quality of relevancy when you can get it there, when it’s present, teaching and learning are easier, and when it’s less present or absent, teaching and learning are harder, so four forms of relevancy, I would mention here. If anybody wants to listen to this in more detail, there’s a 90-minute talk. You can get off our website called Teaching Boys and Other Kids Who Would Rather Be Making Forts All Day.

Yvette:                         I love that title.

Andrew:                       It’s a very popular talk.

There’s intrinsic relevancy. That’s when something is just so interesting that you are totally engaged. You want to learn about it. You lose your sense of time. You’re fascinated. You’re excited. You tell everybody what you’re learning and doing. That’s a super blessing when it happens, but unfortunately, it’s not something you can force. It sometimes happens more often with some kids than others. I mean, there are some kids who are just naturally more inquisitive and curious and will get excited and go pursue something and others who are just a little bit less so, a little more passive, wait around what to do.

To the degree that we as homeschoolers can find things that are intrinsically interesting to children and get them to do that, they’ll be motivated. They’ll use their time. They’ll use their time to be productive, but you may or may not find something that the problem usually comes between what mom believes would be useful learning and what the child believes is relevant and interesting. There could be a gap between those two.

Yvette:                         Sure.

Andrew:                       On the unschooling side of the philosophical spectrum is don’t ever tell kids what to do. Just let them pursue their interests all day, and they’ll learn and come out great in the end. That feels a little dangerous to most of us. Although, I have families that have done that, and there were schools actually around the world that are based on that principle. In many cases, the kid too seem to have come out pretty good on the other end.

Yvette:                         Sure.

Andrew:                       I think that total unschooling freedom idea is pretty – Most of us are a little bit, “Well, that’s too risky.” Then there’s things that people have to learn that maybe they’re not interested in intrinsically. The next form of relevancy to motivate with would be inspired relevancy. You may not be particularly interested in something but because someone whom you love or respect is interested in that thing. You hang out with them, and you catch vicariously a desire and interest to relevancy from that thing. I’ve seen this happen in any number of cases of parents who put kids in a class. The kid’s like, “I don’t want to do that class.”


Andrew Pudewa to Homeschool Dads, “Support and Encourage”

Then the teacher or one of their friends or they make a new friend, someone in that environment is so inspiring, but suddenly that kid likes that class and wants to go and want to read more, and wants to study and wants to become good. I would say probably the most frequent story I hear is the public speaking or speech and debate. Kids are very shy. I don’t want to do public speaking. I don’t want to stand in front of people. I don’t want to memorize the speech. I don’t want to do a debate. You just get them in there and do it for a while. Pretty soon, it’s the bug. The bug bites like the acting bug.

That’s, “Wow! That was cool. I got to do that.” Not only do I want to do that. Again, I want to be good at it. I’m going to polish this speech. I’m going to practice this thing. I’m going to do extra research so I can be good. That speech and debate in my world, is the most obvious example of power of inspiring. For us as homeschoolers today, we have a lot more opportunities to help get our kids connected with people who love something. I personally don’t really like science very much. I’d never wanted to teach science.

If you said, “Here, you have to do biology or physics with your kid,” I’d say, “Well, let’s hurry up and pretend we did this so we could do something meaningful,” but now with coops and classes and programs like Aquinas learning, classical conversations, online classes, which are really very surprisingly interactive with experts, teachers, and many of these teachers now were homeschool kids themselves who are now adults teaching online classes and teaching coop classes for the next generation of homeschoolers. This is so exciting because of their enthusiasm.

I’m sure you’ve seen this.

Yvette:                         Sure.

Andrew:                       You go hear a speaker or a teacher, and you are so inspired to learn more.

Yvette:                         Yes.

“We must be a special creation from an infinite intelligence, because the things humans do, particularly this activity of writing, is so incredibly complex.”

Andrew:                       Kids are like that, but some things are just not interesting. A lot of work books that kids have to do, they don’t see the relevancy. “Why should I have to mark all the parts of speech in this grammar workbook? Why should I have to do all this math? Math is not part of my real life. I don’t use double digit multiplication in reality. It’s just a few exercises and futility that stresses me.” What could be like that? English spelling stuff, even in our world of teaching writing, a lot of kids don’t like having to stay in one spot and wrangle their brain around the process of thinking of something, saying it to themselves, hearing what they say to themselves, remembering what they say to themselves.

Find a few letters to make a word they might know how to spell and not forget all that while they’re doing it. I mean, I’ve been often about thinking about the writing process. It’s so phenomenally complicated. For me, it’s proof that humans could not possibly have evolved.

We must be a special creation from an infinite intelligence, because the things humans do, particularly this activity of writing, is so incredibly complex. Anyway, so how do we help kids with that stuff? Well, this is where we’d move into the third area, and I think this is most applicable to the person who asked that question. That is contrived relevancy. It’s not intrinsically interesting. Nobody’s thrilled about it. Nobody’s going to inspire you. Now, how do you get wanting to do something? That’s when we can try to change it into a game. Sometimes, it’s a very small shift from a chore to a challenge.

That’s the trick. If chores can shift the thing from being a chore to be procrastinated, avoided, done in slow motion, tedious, complaining, to a challenge, “I’ve got to get this done,” then we see really good success. I’ll give you an example of just the slightest little shift that makes a huge difference. Let’s say you have a grammar workbook kind of thing, and you turn the page, and it says, “Identify all the prepositional phrases in the paragraph below. Underline each prepositional phrase with a single underline, and the preposition itself with a double underlie.”

I mean, who wants to do it? I wouldn’t want to do it. You will write stupid. I mean, what’s the point? It has no relevancy, no bearing on reality, but we have to do it. Well, now here’s the shift. In the paragraph below are hidden 13 prepositional phrases. Find them all and you win.

Yvette:                         Let’s make it a game.

Andrew:                       That’s just different. For boys in particular, but also for a lot of girls, it’s like, “Oh, well, I like to win. Okay, great. I’ll play the game.” Now, at some point, just saying you won isn’t quite enough.

Yvette:                         There must be candy involved.

Andrew:                       Some kind of economic system.

Yvette:                         Sure.

Andrew:                       Whether you use pennies or points or pop charts or peanuts, the thing that’s interesting about that is that’s the physical manifestation of something of value to the child that communicates to the child, “Your efforts are valued. I appreciate your work.” Now, some people would say, “Well, you’re bribing the kid to do what he should do anyway.” Well, bribery’s when you pay someone to do something illegal or immoral. That’s neither. You’re creating a game. I love my job. I love working, and I love traveling around the world.

I love teaching, but I’m not sure I would do it quite so much if there wasn’t some kind of economic side to it. Children are… They’re preparing to be adults, boys in particular. If you can set up some type of system to say, “Hey, if you do this much of whatever in this amount of time, then you get these points or these chips or these whatever, and that has value.”

Yvette:                         Sure.

Andrew:                       You can exchange those for some privilege or benefit. Then just be sure the privilege or benefit is something that you would want for the child anyway.

Yvette:                         Sure. Well, if you think about that even in life, whether you’re an entrepreneur or have a job where you’re employed by someone else, you do the work and then you get paid for that work that you do, and so you’re still getting something in return. You’re not just going and doing the job just for the sake of doing the job. That’s life. That’s actually a life skill that they’re learning, that you do this because it’s going to produce this result or you’re going to get this in return.

Andrew:                       If you don’t go that route, then you are stuck going the last… get down to the worst and least effective form of relevancy, which I have termed enforced. Enforced relevancy is when you say you will learn this or you will do this or you will suffer some penalty. I’m not talking about discipline. I am saying, of course, there are things that we all have to do we don’t want to do, and the consequences for not doing them are negative and children need that, but in terms of learning, what happens when you use that type of forced relevancy is you most likely to get the appearance of learning or a very temporary.

I’ll do everything on this page, but when I turn the page, I’m not even going to remember it. I’ll study for the test. As soon as I pass the test, I can forget all that stuff because it wasn’t really important. I really never cared. I just didn’t want to suffer the consequences of getting a bad grade or whatever.

Yvette:                         Sure.

Andrew:                       Sometimes, we resort to that. I mean, I would be the first person to say… I have said things like, “You’re going to have that math finished or you’re not going to eat ever.” I don’t have an easy solution to that person who asked that question, but I think by contemplating some of these basically principles of motivation, and like I said, I don’t know the specifics. My guess is that this person who has a fairly young child who is probably easily distracted. Maybe as young as six or seven. I don’t know. Maybe as old as eight or nine, but it’s possible that she’s taking kind of this let’s do school at home approach, and here’s the pile of books with the number on the cover, and you have to do x number of pages in each of these things every day.

“Some kids read and do math grade at five or six, but as the schools have pushed the academics lower and lower, we in the homeschool look at that and say, “Oh no, we have to do that. We have to start pre-k curriculum, which to me is the most ridiculous, oxymoronic thing you could ever say.”

Andrew:                       “So we stay on schedule and get done by the end of the year. And if we don’t do all that, then we can’t do other learning activities or anything else.” Sometimes, people start there, but then, I think, they come to maybe a little bit more organic understanding, especially, of younger children. I think, we start school too young.

Yvette:                         Yes, I agree.

Andrew:                       We try to press your kids at five and six years old into reading and doing abstract math when they’re not ready for it. Now, some kids are.

Yvette:                         Sure.

Andrew:                       Some kids read and do math grade at five or six, but as the schools have pushed the academics lower and lower, we in the homeschool look at that and say, “Oh no, we have to do that. We have to start pre-k curriculum, which to me is the most ridiculous, oxymoronic thing you could ever say.

Yvette:                         Sure. That’s the stage where kids still need to wiggle and move around. That’s one of the things I have heard you say several times about read-alouds and audio books and things like that is it’s okay for your kids to be flipping around on the ground or playing with Legos or doing whatever it is they do as long as there is moving, because in a classroom, we expect our children to sit still. They have to sit in their chair. They have to sit on their carpet and crisscross their legs and put their hands in their lap and be still.

Well, many kids can’t learn that. They are physically incapable of learning that way effectively. They need to move. They need to explore. They need to be able to do things with their hands and draw pictures. I mean, my 12 almost 13-year-old, she still is like that, and she’s not a real high energy person. She’s pretty mellow, but she still needs, even in church, I mean, she’s always drawing. She has to draw. If she doesn’t doodle on her paper, she’s not going to hear anything that the pastor is saying.

You can find Andrew Pudewa and IEW online at IEW.com.

Andrew Pudewa recommends the following resources in his interview.

Homeschool Legal Defense Association: HSLDA

IEW: Teaching Boys & Other Children Who Would Rather Build Forts All Day

IEW Recommended Book List (Books for Boys & Other Children Who Would Rather Make Forts All Day)

Read Aloud Revival with Schoolhouse Rocked cast member, Sarah Mackenzie.

Book Recommendations:

However Imperfectly by Andrew Pudewa

IEW Book List: Timeline of Classics

Center for Lit: Reading Roadmaps

Honey for a Child’s Heart by Gladys Hunt

Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know by E.D. Hirsch Jr.

The Swiss Family Robinson by Johann David Wyss

 

Photo by Benjamin Davies on Unsplash

Homeschooling Rights and Responsibilities

The following article is an excerpt from the upcoming Schoolhouse Rocked Homeschool Quick-Start Guide, which was contributed by HSLDA (Homeschool Legal Defense Association. If you have questions about homeschool laws or getting started homeschooling, please visit www.hslda.org.

You have looked at various educational options and think that homeschooling may be the best fit for your child(ren). You probably have a million questions, but two of the primary ones may be what are my rights as a parent and what are my responsibilities? Rights and responsibilities go hand in hand; it’s hard to discuss one without covering the other.

First, you have the fundamental right to direct the education and upbringing of your child. This right has been long established and recognized by the United States Supreme Court. What does that mean practically?

Well, you have the right to decide whether to homeschool your child. This is a decision that you as a parent make based on what is in your child’s best interests. Many parents have found homeschooling to be best for all their children. Others have found homeschooling the best fit for one child and another educational option better for a different child. You as the parent know best whether to homeschool your child, and it is your right to decide. A child’s teacher, a county official, your best friend—none of them can decide that for you or deny that to you.

As you may have already discovered, homeschooling is a diverse movement. There are many different methods of homeschooling, and it is your right to determine which method is best for your child. Some families find a fully structured, all-in-one curriculum to best suit their situation. Others have found their children thrive in a more hands-on, organic learning environment. Still others prefer a theme-based or classical great books study which combines several subject areas into an interwoven unit.

Closely related to your homeschool method is your right to choose the resources you will use. There is no pre-approved or state-mandated textbook list. You will find hoards of homeschool resources through homeschooling friends, groups, and online. Do some research, find what looks appealing to you, and give it a try—you can always adjust throughout the year.

A final note on your rights in homeschooling: you have the right to privacy in your own home. Occasionally a government official will attempt to intimidate a homeschooling parent by saying, “You have to let me in to inspect your schooling, records, etc.” Don’t be fooled: in this situation, it’s best to get direction from a legal professional. Membership in HSLDA is a comforting way to be sure you have that guidance if it is ever needed.

All of this sounds good, you say. But how do I know what I have to do? There are three straightforward responsibilities every homeschool parent has: know your state law, follow your state law, and provide of your child’s education.

Homeschooling is legal in all 50 states and is governed by state law. For this reason, the specific requirements you may have will vary depending on what state you are in. Some states require you to teach certain subjects, others require you to file paperwork, and some require certain evaluations. You can find your state’s homeschool law at https://hslda.org/content/laws/.

But it’s not enough to know your state law: you are responsible to follow it as well. Make a checklist for each year and set a reminder of any deadlines to help keep you on track. (Homeschooling parents are busy, and it’s easy for deadlines to slip past!) Keep good records showing you followed the law because that information will be important as your children graduate and enter college or the workforce.

Finally, and most importantly, you as a parent are responsible to provide for your child’s education. This is true for every parent! Again, states have differing ages set for when a child is subject to compulsory attendance (when he would have to start attending school), and many states include educational neglect in their child protection laws. A parent may provide for a child’s education by enrolling him in a school, thus delegating the actual educational instruction to someone else. Or, as you are considering, a parent may decide to provide for his child’s education by instructing him directly.

Choosing how to educate your child is a big decision. Homeschooling is a wonderful option many parents and children find rewarding. While it is a lot of work, the one-on-one individualized instruction is rarely equaled elsewhere, and the homeschool community is a supportive network.

If you have more questions about homeschool laws or getting started homeschooling, please visit www.hslda.org or give us a call!

 

Flag photo by Bonnie Kittle on Unsplash

Mother and daughter photo by Artem Maltsev on Unsplash

Books photo by Clarisse Meyer on Unsplash

Map photo by Joey Csunyo on Unsplash

How to Start Homeschooling

So, you’ve decided to homeschool. Questions will come to mind after you have decided to start homeschooling. There are a number of things to consider and places to get answers, but first, remember you are not alone! Homeschooling has become a viable and an accepted alternative means of education. Chances are there are a number of active homeschool communities and groups near you for support and interaction.

5 Things to Consider When You Decide to Start Homeschooling

Check Your State Laws
You will want to check your state on the laws for homeschooling. If you are withdrawing any children from school, you will also want to check out what documentation is required and the procedure to withdraw them and start a homeschool in your state. When starting a homeschool, you will want to make sure you are submitting the required forms and meet any requirements to be able to homeschool your children (these vary from state to state). Also, you want to be aware of any records you need to complete, submit, and keep to start the year, during the year, and complete the year. There are websites available to consult about local state laws and updates to those laws. State departments usually have a homeschooling department for information and required documents. The Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) provides you with local state laws, updates and upcoming legislation, contact information for questions, documents, and reporting, local groups, and general homeschool information and guidance.

Research Learning and Homeschooling Styles
After you are familiar with your legal requirements, the fun begins. Homeschooling gives you the freedom to choose how and what you will use to learn in your homeschool. First, you will want to determine your and your child’s learning styles. You will want to be aware of your own preferences and how that might work with your child’s preferences. These learning styles vary from visual, auditory, and kinesthetic to a preference for learning and processing concepts and skills in an organized and structured format or learning concepts in a random or more spontaneous fashion. These learning styles will influence the materials and curriculum you purchase.

Here is a Learning Style Quiz to take to see what preferences you and your child may have in your learning styles.

Next, you will want to determine your Homeschooling Style or Philosophy. These range from a Traditional or Classical Approach to Charlotte Mason or Montessori Methods to Project Based units or Unit Studies. Again, you may have one approach that you would enjoy teaching and spending your day doing and your child may have another. So, it’s important to get an idea of where everyone is coming from.

Here is a Homeschooling Philosophy Quiz to give you an idea of everyone’s preferences.

After you have your results, you can read summaries of these philosophies at HSLDA.  

There are other homeschooling styles you can look into as well like Hybrid Homeschooling academies where your child attends a school for only specific days during the week and then completes the assigned school work at home for the rest of the week. There also online schools for one, some, or all of your classes.

Choosing your Curriculum
Now, is the really fun part! It’s like Christmas shopping from a catalogue. Based on the results of what kind of learning and homeschooling styles you and your children prefer, you will make choices about curriculum and materials you want to use. There are some curriculum resources specifically geared toward certain styles and others that can be used interchangeably.

A lot of homeschoolers refer to themselves as “Eclectic Homeschoolers”, meaning they use a combination of materials and teaching and learning styles that meet their needs. As you homeschool more children at one time or your children become middle and high schoolers, you may want to consider using online classes to free up your time in planning and leaving you available to work one on one with other children.

Homeschool conventions are a great place to evaluate lots of curriculum at once. Check out Teach Them Diligently and Great Homeschool Conventions, or look for your state homeschooling organization’s convention. Conventions are also a great way to get encouraged and to feel like you are part of a MOVEMENT, so plan to attend one this year. There is nothing quite like being in one place with hundreds or thousands of like-minded people.

Look for Groups, Activities, and Classes to Join
You can look into support groups for moms or your children to find out what is available to homeschoolers in your area, such as classes, activities, field trips, and other resources. You can look to your church for activities, as well as Christian groups and coops in your area to find a homeschooling community of faith. Some school systems also allow homeschooled children to participate in elective classes and extracurricular activities, while others allow no participation.

You will want to decide if you want to commit yourself to something that meets regularly or allow yourself the flexibility to join in on specific activities as they arise. You also want to keep in mind that all groups have different personalities and one group may not be a fit for you and your family, while another might be just right.

Look into opportunities that are open to all students if you do not find ones you are interested in that are tailored specifically to homeschoolers. Businesses and museums often cater to homeschoolers with classes and field trip days.

Decide what Kind of Schedule you Want to Follow
You will want to decide if you wish to follow a more traditional school schedule that matches your local school or a year round schedule to allow for vacation time or extra time off each week or during the school year. As long as you meet your state’s required number of days of school, the scheduling is up to you. From there, you can decide what kind of daily school schedule you wish to follow. The sky’s the limit!

You might want to cover a subject each day for a short designated amount of time or do more of a block schedule where you take more time on specific days of the week to only cover specific subjects. We did a combination of short daily lessons for certain things like math, reading, spelling, where I felt we needed the daily review, and spent more time only a couple of times per week on science or social studies. We saved Fridays for field trips, projects, experiments, or special classes. With time, you will find your personal rhythm and routine that suits you and your family.

As they say, “The days may feel long, but the years are short.” So, even though the above list is important in building a successful homeschool foundation, the most important thing is to build your family in your faith in Christ and enjoy your time together and your homeschool journey!


Written by Katie Glennon of Katie’s Homeschool Cottage. Read more posts by Katie.

 


 

Photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash

Photo by Lonely Planet on Unsplash

Photo by Anna Samoylova on Unsplash