Two weeks before my son was to start kindergarten, a dear family friend of ours called and asked what we were doing sending our five year old to school. He spoke to me for a long time, telling me the downfalls of public education and the benefits of home school. From the beginning, even before our son was born, I wanted to home school, but my husband had said, "NO!" and that was the end of it. So, when our dear friend called, I was more than eager to hear all the arguments he had. I then turned around and used them with my husband, and this time he listened! Praise God for his ears opening to hear, and his heart softening enough to pay attention to what I was saying. God works in his own time, but this was cutting it a little close for me, because I was far from prepared.

As far back as I can remember, I have always believed that children are a gift from God, and our job is to nurture them, and not hand them to someone else to do our job. So many places in the Bible speak of parents teaching their children. I see nothing written about giving them to the schools to teach them. We home school because we believe it is part of our Christian duty. We home school for religious reasons and because we believe it is the BEST education we can give our children.

This year is a little different from the last two years. We are using a much more relaxed way of teaching. The last two years were filled with text books and our teaching methods were straight out of the school system. We used Christian curriculum, but it was all work books and text books. This year we have opted to use Unit Studies and a new type of Language Arts in which dictation and actual literature is used to teach spelling, parts of speech, reading, etc. This method is considered gentle learning, and I am very pleased with the results. The children call their lessons FUN and I really enjoy teaching.