When I was 18 and went away to college it was so fascinating to meet people from all over who had so many different experiences in their cultures.  One of my roommates had been a military kid.  When her father got out of the military, they sold everything, bought an RV and homeschooled around the country.  I was so awestruck.  As someone who didn’t travel much, I was totally impressed with the power of learning that way.  I decided then and there that that was what I wanted to do with my children someday.

I fairly promptly forgot about that decision.  I had years before I would become a mom of school age kids.  Then when they were of age, I was so overwhelmed that I couldn’t wait to send them to school.  I needed that time to recover from the unending demands and insanity.  Both of my kids were in public school all day for 6 glorious months.   My house was clean, I was more productive in those months than I had been in the past 6 years.  It was great. Then 2020 came around, COVID shut everything down and the kids were home. It was alright.  And then come spring elections and our school levy failed. This led to summer and our superintendent threw a temper tantrum and our schoolboard decided to grade level without notice to the community.  There was no to prepare and it was a disaster.  Teachers were frustrated, families were frustrated, kids were confused and then to top it all off the superintendent left and we all had to deal with his mess. So between trying to come back from COVID and grade level at the same time things were a mess.  I decided that since they were basically experimenting on the children anyway, I could experiment on them at home myself.  My oldest was already frustrated with school and was not retaining what he needed to and I knew he was the type of kid to get lost in the shuffle if I didn’t step in for him.

So I sent in my letter of intention and started researching what I was going to do with them.  I decided to take things all the way back to basics and do skill based learning and not worry about grade level at this point.  I expected homeschooling to last for just one year.  That would give the school system time to get their act together and my kids the focus that they needed.

It turns out that they loved it!  They told me that they learned so much more at home than they did at school.  I personally felt like I did a terrible job, so what on earth was going on at school?  So that became our new way of life.  And at that time I decided that we needed to start working in adventures. If the lessons were going to stick, I needed to make it real life for them.  

I decided to make as much of their education as hands on/immersive as possible.  I had no idea how deep these lessons would go and immersive we would get, but this was definitely the best way my kids have learned.