Southeast Texas Homeschool – An Attitude of Learning

Southeast Texas Homeschool Help

Engage and Attitude of Learning

On today’s edition of Southeast Texas Homeschool Notes, we share some inspiration for those living the homeschool life in Southeast Texas and for those exploring it for the first time.

Southeast Texas homeschooling is a big movement right now. Southeast Texas Christians are dedicated to providing the best possible education. In some parts of Southeast Texas, public school is a great fit. Many parents have turned to private Southeast Texas Christian schools in an effort to both put their children in a positive environment and to give them an academic leg up. For many Southeast Texas Christians there is no substitute for educating one’s own children at home.

Homeschooling is a mindset. It’s not just doing school at home. It is teaching in every presentable opportunity. Obviously when a family spends more time together, there are more opportunities to expand that moment of curiosity into a cross circular lesson. A trip to the grocery store is a lesson in health, budgeting, weighing produce, and making positive choices. A trip to grandma’s house offers courses in horseback riding, feeding the pigs, Candy Land, Monopoly, fishing, snail catching, bread baking, and family love. Often time lessons are a slow process, loooonnngg, and painfully frustrating. Others are quick, easy, and a great source of pride to everyone involved in the lesson – mom, dad, brother, sister, grandparents.

Southeast Texas home school families often actively seek activities and experiences that will complement the lessons they are learning or will even create impromptu lessons to fit an upcoming activity or vacation. When the movie “42” came out we took the opportunity to learn about Black pioneers in sports, music, and other areas of life. We had lessons on racism. We talked about heroes. Before a trip to Moody Gardens a Southeast Texas home school family might create some pre-trip lessons on marine biology, the rain forest, or a subject that matches up with Moody Gardens’ current I-Max schedule.

Homeschooling is not for every student. There are many Southeast Texas children that benefit from other more traditional types of education. However, the one-on-one, personal attention, customized pace, and individualized choices of studies that home schooling offers help to streamline each student’s gifts, talents, likes, and interests for increased motivation and pleasure in learning.

Homeschooling is not for every parent. There are many parents that find it difficult to teach core skills to younger children or don’t feel comfortable with the heavy weight of being responsible for educating their child/ children.

Through the struggles, Southeast Texas home schooling delivers its own rewards for parents – the pride in a child’s eye from learning to read, a child’s confidence in selecting a new book, young joy in learning about a specific subject, the surprise in her/her face when their mind clicks on its own. Those are moments that every teacher experiences. It’s what gets them through the insurmountable paperwork and stressful parent/teacher meetings, but to think that I (the parent) get that reward is something that I don’t want to give away. Southeast Texas home school parents are present for a lot of their children’s firsts, from reading to math to grasping the size and wonder of the larger world around us. Children spend a huge percentage of their lives in the classroom. For Southeast Texas home school families, this is time spent together.

Homeschooling – It’s a frame of mind that invades all parts of life, when you have achieved that perspective it’s like taking off the sunshades and donning the rose colored glasses – for student and teacher alike.

There are many benefits and challenges that come with being a Southeast Texas home school family. For many families the first year of being a one income family can be terrifying. Typically the parent who is teaching has little or no time for generating income. On the other hand, your children will almost always be protected from the countless minor illnesses contracted in traditional school settings. That is a blessing for any family.

Many Southeast Texas churches have home school ministries. This gives you the opportunity to network with other believers in your area from Orange to Warren and Sour Lake to Kirbyville as well as to become more familiar with other Southeast Texas churches beyond your home church.

There are many tools to assist you including Southeast Texas home schooling websites, blogs, and coops. We’ll cover many of them in upcoming articles.

Feel free to e-mail us information about your favorite Southeast Texas home school resource.

We’d love to share it with other Southeast Texas Christians. Stay tuned for future articles on Southeast Texas homeschooling.