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“What if the Catholic school in your area was just phenomenal?” a friend recently asked me. “If they did a fantastic job, wouldn’t you prefer someone else do all that work?”
After some trial and error in kindergarten, we have figured out what works for us (for now). I suppose you could classify our homeschooling style as “eclectic.” We are very intrigued by the Charlotte Mason ideal of education as “an atmosphere, a discipline, and a life.” We use a lot of what she would call “living books” for history and religion. We also really enjoy a traditional table-work setup for subjects like math and language arts, and we attend a classical co-op. So, I suppose you could say we do homeschool the way my husband and I do date nights: we order a bunch of things so we can have a little taste of everything.
Not so very long ago, I found myself calling a friend, another homeschooling mom, in the grips of indecisiveness. Several months in, I was second-guessing our decision to homeschool.
Am I giving her enough? I wondered. Should she really be at school? Do I just want to keep her little?
Even though our daughter was already enrolled in the parish school, I attended the Catholic Moms Homeschooling Retreat at our local cathedral this past fall. There was a quiet stirring in my heart drawing me to homeschooling. If nothing else, I thought, I might make a few new friends. I felt a twinge of impostor syndrome as I filled my disposable cup with bad coffee and nibbled on a crumbly scone that morning. My daughter was going to school. We had already paid the registration fee. My scone and its crumbs were meant for someone else.
Neither my husband nor I grew up Catholic, so we are sort of making up this Domestic Church thing as we go. Of course, we have great witnesses of Catholic family life that we can look to for examples, but not having lived it ourselves as children, sometimes imagining what that means just isn’t on our radar. One of these areas is family prayer. We both knew we wanted that to be an integral part of our children’s memories of growing up, an indispensable aspect of our family culture. But what does it look like?
The following routine did not come easily. It was hard-won with lots of trial, error, screaming and crying (on both my part and the kids’). It comes after years of stay-at-home-momming through seasons successful and harrowing. It comes after much research and reading into how to do this mom thing better.
When we decided to homeschool, I devoured everything I could find on developing a philosophy of home education. I fell in love with Charlotte-Mason-inspired visions of our kids spending time in nature and being immersed in an atmosphere of education. I drank in the wisdom of Elizabeth’s Foss’s Real Learning Revisited and Sarah Mackenzie’s Teaching From Rest. I binged on the Commonplace podcast, determined to introduce my children to the good, true, and beautiful and so help them acquire a life-long taste for them.
