We were new (tired) parents in 2009 and didn’t have a grand educational philosophy or plan for future schooling.
I was excited to read to my baby son, but we had hardly any children’s books and I wasn’t terribly interested in that kind of material yet.
I picked up Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days and started reading aloud to my one-month-old.
He fell asleep on me most times and I kept on reading because it felt like a magic spell. Sometimes I fell asleep.
Mary laughed everytime I said, “Passepartout,” and it strikes me that Westen just this week discovered an interest in French that was unexpected. Although, he says, he may switch to Spanish.
I always try to remind parents interested in home education that they’ve been doing it for years. No child between the ages of 1 and 5 needs school to learn a vast amount of skills and knowledge. No one needs any school after that either. We’ve been conditioned to accept school as a universal, yet we are born to learn. The home education community is growing exponentially and the examples of children thriving without school are plentiful.