Author: Anastasia

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Lynn has been homeschooling since 1997. Her eldest three went to school for a time, and then, because of bullying issues, she and her husband decided to try homeschooling for six months. Lynn had always been interested in homeschooling, and said, “I believe that it was something that the Lord put on my heart to do.” Lynn is a mum of thirteen, and she still homeschools her youngest two.

There were less resources available in 1997 then there are now, and Lynn talks about how she started homeschooling with a Protestant curriculum. Then, she started adding Catholic material and she “really began to develop our own curriculum and our own program.”

Lynn was “very influenced by Charlotte Mason’s philosophy of education,” and likes good books; she says “we’ve all been quite voracious readers.” She mentions Real Learning: Education in the Heart of the Home, by Elizabeth Foss. Elizabeth Foss was a mum of seven, and so has some good advice to offer for large families.

Lynn mentions that all her kids have some level of dyslexia. Homeschooling gave Lynn “the ability to…adapt curriculum to suit their needs and their struggles, and it’s allowed us to maintain their self-esteem and their learning while making allowances for where their struggles are.” Some of her children went for assessments, and “while reading abilities have been, because of their dyslexia, below their age-group, their vocabulary, their comprehension, their word knowledge, has all been a few years above.” Lynn could cater to the needs of each child through homeschooling, especially when “what worked for one child didn’t always work for the next child.” Lynn continues, “often their self-esteem, which could have been eroded in a school setting, was preserved by homeschooling.”

Homeschooling has also helped the Burton family grow closer to each other. Lynn says, “The family relationships, the lifestyle relationships, that keeps the family unit together in a different way than sending them to school does.”

The Burton family live in the country, which can be a little isolating. There was one other Catholic homeschooling family living close by, but otherwise “a lot of the time we were on our own.” Lynn made an effort to take her children to events like March for Life and Christus Rex. In 2001, along with another family, Lynn started a Catholic homeschooling camp. This gave her children the chance to be around priests, religious, and other Catholic kids, and forge lasting friendships.

A typical day at the camp will start with 9am Traditional Latin Mass, followed by morning tea, and then talks and Catechesis. Sometimes some people chant the office, or there is Catechesis of the Good Shepherd, or Culture Project sessions.

Lynn says “It is authentically Catholic…we are unapologetically Catholic.” Once, someone who wasn’t Catholic at the time attended a camp and “she is now Catholic.” The camp will occur for the twenty-fourth time this year.

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Image: Francisco de Zurbarán, No restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons

Written by Marian Le Grelle

AMDG 

“But he that shall scandalize one of these little ones that believe in me, it were better for  him that a millstone should be hanged about his neck, and that he should be drowned in the  depth of the sea. Woe to the world because of scandals.” Matthew 18:6 

On pilgrimage, I asked God to show me His will for my life within the vocation of marriage  and motherhood. The answer was a clear, “Take the children to daily Mass.” Confirmation  came in writing with the words that followed explaining that children console Him for the  ingratitude of others. 

Homeschooling was a decision to follow my conscience. My conscience said, “Don’t hurt  the children by having them lied to by people in authority over them.” Parenthood entails culpability; we are responsible before God for our choices in our children’s education. 

The greatest gift of homeschooling is being in relationship with God as a family. It’s a  privilege to get to know and to love each child. It’s a privilege to watch them grow while  growing closer to God and to each other day by day. 

His curriculum is holiness. Virtues and gifts of the Holy Ghost cover most topics and the  assignments consist of loving one another while juggling pregnancy, moving, sickness, birth,  death, daily duty, study, acts of charity to others, and recreation. These crosses and joys are  part of the graduation program and are far more powerful than academics in shaping our  families into His image. 

Today there is much support for homeschooling in online schools and in homeschool  groups. We’ve been blessed to have the help of our priests and religious as well as Mother  of Divine Grace School, an American online school which allows us to be the primary  educators of our children. They know why we are homeschooling and want to help us teach  the faith of the apostles to our children that they may know their faith. They know we  aren’t perfect and help us on our way. 

Many assume that we must be patient because we homeschool. We aren’t naturally  patient, but we get a lot of practice in that virtue and a lot of reasons to approach the  sacraments. We can’t control what happens in our relationships with each other, but as  principals of the school, we can set the house rules and choose our responses to what God  allows in our relationships. We can teach love and truth and leave the rest to God.  

St.Thomas Aquinas once asked St. Bonaventure in which books Bonaventure had learned his “sacred science.” St. Bonaventure pointed to the crucifix and answered, “This is the source  of all my knowledge.” The saints give every homeschooler confidence and hope that he or she will turn out okay and much better than okay. They become the saints they are called  to be because they know themselves and discern the will of God in their lives.

Written by Monica Aarts

Image and article used with the kind permission of Family Life International, Australia. Original source: FLI homeschooling, FLI website.

Monica Aarts is married for seven years and is a mother of four daughters, has been homeschooling her children for around three years.

Homeschooling is not for the faint hearted. Before having children, my husband and I were determined to homeschool our future children so that they would not miss out on the rich education our own schooling experience had deprived us of. We wanted our children to love our Catholic faith, to read the Good Books, to study Latin, to enjoy Maths, to embrace Music, to wonder in Science, and to have a deep grasp of their own written and spoken word. In short, we hoped to give them the most holistic form of education in the Liberal Arts, all the while growing in holiness.

I have four daughters aged 6, 4, 2, and a newborn. My main homeschooling philosophy is a mixture of Classical education and Charlotte Mason’s approach. For this reason, I use a range of resources from different curriculums to suit our family. This includes a blend of Memoria Press, The Good and the Beautiful, and Ambleside Online, alongside with the suggestions of Laura Berquist and Elizabeth Foss. A normal homeschooling day looks like our family sitting in our home library where we say a morning prayer together. Then, the girls do 20 minutes of Catechism and a short Latin lesson with their father, followed by two hours of read aloud books and narration journaling with me. Afterwards, we go to the dining table to teach my 6 year old to spell, do maths and work on her handwriting, teach my 4 year old to read, entertain my 2 year old with lots of fine motor skill table work and song, and all the while care for my newborn.

What my little experience has taught me after officially homeschooling preschool to year 1, is that homeschooling is so much more than a curriculum. Indeed, I can confidently say that our homeschooling experience began from the moment I brought my first-born home and sang her hymns and nursery rhymes.

Homeschooling is a journey of fostering little minds that naturally wonder, and to continue to form their little minds to desire and seek that which is true, good, and beautiful.

That is because the early voyage of homeschooling begins by leading our children’s minds to the enchanting world of story, the love of God in catechism, the monotonous plane of handwriting, the ever so rewarding place of reading, the strange conceptual world of maths, and most especially the wondrous world in reality: everything they themselves see, hear and touch in reality – in God’s creation. It is such a beautiful task, but there is a catch: the path is narrow, and the mother must bear all things for their little ones. Indeed, I’ve seen that it is not so much my children, but I myself who have been called most to holiness through homeschooling; because, with each step I have to be Sam Gamgee pulling Frodo up… and to be honest, sometimes it’s tempting to be a bit of a Gollum.

I’ve also learned – and continue to learn – what Sarah Mackenzie advocates, that we must ‘Learn from Rest’. I cannot force my children to eat what is bitter, but I can tempt them with milk and honey, and I can do it restfully. Young mothers going into homeschooling these days, unlike those of our parents’ generation, are inundated with options on how to homeschool. There are hundreds of different curriculums, philosophies and opinions, and it is easy to get caught up with how to homeschool. There is immense pressure to not make a wrong step in our choice and our approach, lest we fail our children. When I first looked at homeschooling, I began to write up my own curriculum and it was inundated with resources and curriculums that were considered ‘the best’; but what I quickly realised was that I found them difficult to teach and my daughter found them dry and boring. We were both uninspired. We stopped wondering. We felt like we were pushing a heavy load up a hill. In short, they did not suit our family, and they did not bring us closer to desiring the Good, True and Beautiful. A radical move was needed…

I do not have the means to cram the entirety of the world’s knowledge into my children’s minds. But, I can learn and seek out my unique child’s gifts and strengths and to teach them accordingly. In turn, I can also figure out my own strengths, and find resources and methods that  are milk and honey for my particular child. For example, I am personally a literature fanatic. I love to read and I love to understand what stories mean. For this reason, we read a lot, because the children absorb that love I exude when I read them these stories, and the creative ideas I naturally come up with to get them to understand it more deeply is attractive to them.

Consequently, homeschooling is not for the faint hearted. It is not just about carefully moulding the best resources and curriculum, but it involves creating a warm refuge where our children’s gifts can be cultivated by the people who know them best and who desire their holiness, while also striving to grow in holiness themselves. Indeed, that’s why I personally feel called, because although the road is narrow, the goal is a treasure. My goal is to be a mother that learns about who my child is and to teach them accordingly, and to help them ‘love that which is lovely’ in an environment that is surrounded by all things Good, True and Beautiful, which means I myself must strive towards this ideal too.

Article Originally Published:

Aarts, Monica, “Homeschooling like Samwise,” FLI Homeschooling, Family Life International website, Australia.

Written by Marion O’Halloran

Article and image used with the kind permission of Family Life International, Australia. Original source: FLI homeschooling, FLI website.

Marion O’Halloran has been married to Brady for 19 years, has 6 children and has been Homeschooling for 14 years. Her father, Bernard Sadler, was one of the founding members of what is now Family Life International, Australia.

I never intended to homeschool. As a young single woman, I thought for sure that I would be sending my then-theoretical children to school. I was sent first to a Catholic Primary School and then to a private girls’ school. I have mixed feelings about both of those experiences but I never once questioned the “rightness” of sending children into an institution outside the family home to gain an education. At least, I never questioned it until my children were no longer theoretical.

Becoming a parent for the first time made me take seriously everything that had previously been merely theoretical, but also to take seriously all the things I wanted my children to inherit from me, and in particular, my Faith. The situation with regards to teaching children the Catholic Faith was pretty dire when I was at school in the 80s and early 90s, but now it was that same generation that would now be teaching MY children. My own faith education, being what it was, was objectively far more advanced than so many of my peers, but I was only just beginning to discover just how lacking it really was despite that. I couldn’t in good conscience send my children into a system which had failed so many in their faith development, including my own. So I decided to homeschool. My primary motivation was my Faith and how I wanted it to be taught to my children.

I say “I” because the bulk of the decision and the bulk of the work involved in this naturally fell to me. My husband was and is very supportive but I was the one who would be at home with the children while my husband went out to work. I think it is important to acknowledge that, by and large, it is the mother of the household who will school the children. But rather than see this as an extra burden, I would like, rather, to paint this as a natural extension of our primary role as mothers. We who helped teach our children to sit up, feed themselves, wash themselves, brush their teeth, walk and talk, now teach our children to read and write and think critically. Why should we think that we aren’t able to provide our own children with an education? We who knew them from the earliest moments of their existence, who know them and love them better than anyone other than God? I would suggest that if our own schooling made us unfit to teach our own children, then the education we received was indeed sorely lacking, but why on earth would we then send our own children into it to be similarly poorly educated?

So I started. I kept telling myself it would just be for that year and then we would see how we went. I kept saying that to people who questioned me as to whether I would send my kids to school too – it kept them off my back. I started to teach my child in the same way that I had been taught: I sat her at the table with a book in front of her, allocated a certain time to each subject and thought that was how it would be, nay SHOULD be. Let me now tell you that homeschooling your children will be every bit YOUR education as theirs – but such a rewarding one. That was when I discovered that this idea of putting our children into a room with 30 other children of the same age to learn about a certain subject in isolation from everything else, in a set period of time, outside of both their interest or any relevance to them, was not actually educating them. Sure, they were being schooled, but not educated. I am so thankful that I didn’t persist in that model but learned that homeschooling is best seen as fitting in naturally with the ebb and flow of family life.

Before I knew it I was 13 years in and with 5 more children and now with the very real possibility of homeschooling for another 15 years, God willing. Apart from a few hiccups along the way, some more serious than others, I have only been glad of the choice that we made. The benefits of homeschooling are many. Our children are good friends with each other. Sure, they fight and bicker like any siblings do, but the strong familial ties that are created with the help of homeschooling are an anomaly in today’s society. Our children are excellent autodidacts: I can’t tell you how much I have learned from my younger son on birdlife and marine animal life alone! Two subjects I previously thought were dead boring were brought to life by my son. I often say that I have now received an excellent primary school education after homeschooling my own children. We are learning together. Our children are able to pursue their own interests and passions without the constraint of the 40 minute block of the classroom. They are able to learn about their passion and without reference to a timetable or a test. I can show the world to them in a safe and loving environment without the bullying or the progressive political agendas that permeate so much of our society and educational institutions today. They are learning to love learning. We have beautiful friendships with other like-minded homeschooling families and we have been able to create a community they thrive in.

I’m not going to pretend to have all the answers. We’re still raising our children and have only just gained an adult child this year. I don’t know what the future holds. I don’t know how this journey will turn out. The world can be so ugly but I believe that by homeschooling our children, my husband and I have been able to give our children a beautiful childhood and a firm foundation in our Faith.

Article Originally Published:

O’Halloran, Marion, “Why Homeschool,” FLI Homeschooling, Family Life International website, Australia.