The Homeschooling Handbook_ From Preschool to High School - Mary Griffith [96]
“I Wanna Go to School!”
Occasionally, children will make it quite clear that homeschooling is not for them:
I began homeschooling in a temporary apartment with three children working on one small dining table. This was in my canned curriculum stage, so we spent a lot of time at that table. We were moving and had to wait on housing. When we finally moved into our home, it was such a blessing to spread out. Meanwhile, back in the little apartment I had one eleven-year-old child who did not want to homeschool. She didn’t want to even be in Indiana. She wanted to go back to Omaha and be with her friends. She made life miserable for all of us. She has since told me that she did everything she could think of to make life hard for homeschooling so we would put her in school. Well, that was impossible for us to do, so she stayed home the entire time we were in Indiana. I tried everything I could think of to make homeschooling more palatable for her. I was involved in discussing unschooling online, and I thought that might be the answer for her, but she rejected it. She had been in school so long that she couldn’t believe that she could unschool and not end up being stupid. She spent a good deal of time sleeping, which is a normal thing at this stage of life. She thought I was a bad teacher because I didn’t force her to learn, but she also thought I was awful when I made demands on her. It was a no-win situation. Once we moved back to Omaha, we put her in school again. It was her choice. She has not changed her mind about this, even though she has found out that middle school does not give her much time for sitting and chatting with her friends. She prefers to be in a classroom. She has made modest improvements in her learning, but as far as science and social studies are concerned, she’s gone back to the “memorize and dump” system of learning, which bothers me. Homeschooling without her at home is so much smoother. We actually enjoy our days. So until she’s truly ready to homeschool, she’ll remain in school.—Beverly, Nebraska
At some point, homeschooled kids who’ve never been to school start to wonder about what they’re missing. Perhaps the neighbor kids tell them they’ll be stupid if they don’t go to school, or perhaps they’re just curious about what school is like and whether they could handle it. Whatever the cause, it’s important to deal with your children’s questions before the school question becomes a major issue. Talk with them. Find out what they want to know about school, and answer as many questions as you can.
Many homeschooling parents find themselves panicked when their five- or six-year-olds announce they have no interest in homeschooling and insist they want to go to school. In most cases, kids this age have something specific they want to do. Most commonly, they want to ride on a school bus and, even when the local public school is only half a block away, insist that going to school will allow them to do so. When the attraction is something simple and concrete like a school bus ride, it’s usually a pretty simple matter to deal with.
For more general curiosity about school, it may be possible to arrange to visit a classroom for a day or two. A local public school may be happy to allow such a visit, in hopes of encouraging enrollment, or a private school may turn out to be more helpful. Most homeschooled kids find the experience interesting but end up preferring to stick with homeschooling.
Some will finally decide they truly want to go to school, however, and you may find, like Beverly did, that school is the best option. At the elementary level, there is usually no problem for homeschooled children getting into school. Sometimes the child will be placed according to her age; other schools will administer diagnostic tests to determine the appropriate grade level. Typically, homeschooled children tend to score on such tests at or above grade level in all areas but math, where they tend to score high on problem-solving skills and a bit below grade level on computational