How We Were Led to Homeschooling

I’ve been receiving a few inquiries lately via email and my Facebook page about homeschooling. People ask why we do it, how we do it and so on. So I thought I’d share with you a little bit about how we were led to homeschool.

My husband and I first heard about homeschooling at a pro-life conference we attended when I was pregnant with our first child. The speaker from Human Life International mentioned homeschooling during one of his talks, and we were intrigued and wanted to learn more about it.

Soon after that, we started reading about how Bo Sanchez, a well-known Catholic lay preacher, and his wife Marowe, had also been led to homeschool their kids, and eventually set up Catholic Filipino Academy, to help other parents teach their children at home.

The more we came to learn about homeschooling, the more we felt drawn to it. At that time, we were still based in Timor Leste as lay missionaries for our Catholic community, Couples for Christ.

So we started praying actively about it, and doing our research.

When our eldest reached preschool age, people started asking us if we were going to send him to any of the international schools in Dili, the capital of Timor Leste.

Actually, when he was still just two years old, people would ask us if he was already going to school, because he seemed so “smart” to them and had good communication skills for his age. Some people even thought he was already four!

Of course, they’d be surprised when we’d say he was only two. We didn’t realize it then, but we were actually already “homepreschooling” him at the time. And we were already seeing the benefits of it.

It was only when I learned about the term “homepreschooling” from Susan Lemons’s website (www.susanlemons.wordpress.com), that I realized that that was what we were doing, and what we are doing now with our three year old daughter.

As you can guess, eventually — after much prayer, consultation with other homeschoolers and endless research — we decided that homeschooling is really the “path” that we are meant to travel, at least for now.

Both our children have specific gifts and talents and abilities, and it’s our role as parents to help them discover these. I know all parents aim to do so, even if they’re not homeschooling, but my husband and I believe that educating our kids at home (and elsewhere — the whole world is our classroom, as one of my fellow homeschool moms likes to say) is the best way for us to help our kids reach their fullest potential.

Wait — scratch that — it’s not really about our kids reaching their fullest potential. It’s about them learning to be who God meant them to be. It’s about spending the most time we can with them, praying together, learning together, growing together, living life together.

Most of all, it’s about training our kids for eternal life — not to be successful, but to be faithful. After all, this life that we live is only temporary, right?

P.S. If you have any questions about homeschooling, feel free to ask me — though I’m warning you, I’m no expert, OK? You can send me an email at tina@trulyrichmom.com or connect with me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/trulyrichteachermamatina and Twitter: https://twitter.com/tinasrodriguez