My name is Ruth Winn and I have three children, ages 6, 8, and 11. I’ve just finished my fourth year of homeschooling, so I’m the new kid on the block among the writers on this blog who have many more years of homeschooling wisdom and experience. I look forward to learning from them.
I didn’t expect to be a homeschool mom. I was the mom who said No way, not this child, he’ll never be able to learn from me, I need a break from him, I’ll end up in the loony bin if I have to spend every day with him. You get the point. So off my firstborn went to kindergarten at a private school. It was a good year. It was also the year we learned he had dyslexia. He struggled a lot in first grade even though he was in therapy, and it was then that God began changing my heart about homeschooling as I realized that my son needed the extra attention that a homeschooling environment could provide. So with much prayer and trepidation, I decided the next year I would try my hand at homeschooling.
It was an awful year. Allow me to illustrate. Recently, my 6-year-old daughter got serious about mastering the monkey bars. She was just getting the hang of it when the blisters came, and then the ripping of the blisters, the bloody hands, the tears. That’s what most days of homeschooling felt like, and by the end of March, my husband and I had decided to put the kids back in school. I had the paperwork filled out and ready to mail in when something (God!) stopped me, and in a moment of clarity I thought Do I really want to give up on this—it’s been painful, yes, but I have learned so much, especially about what NOT to do. My blisters had turned to callouses—the good kind—that would let me swing farther and higher. I had toughened up.
The second year was hard, but better, and now with four years under my belt, I can truly say that I love homeschooling. Not every day, but enough to know this is the way I want to school forever. Or at least for the time God has given to me. I want to seize every opportunity I have to influence my precious children to live for Christ and stand as lights in this dark world.
