Homeschooling, presently, has gained quite a solid base
following after many years of being frowned upon and misconstrued as a sort of
deficient learning method. We clearly remember before how well-meaning friends
and family members around us either giving us their blank stare of disbelief or
an upfront unsolicited advice to bring our son to a traditional school whenever
we told them that he is being home-schooled.
Looking back, our home-school journey started with painful a
family tragedy. Back in 2008, while we were living overseas, we lost our 22
month-old daughter. We were devastated. But with God’s healing and loving
support of people around us, we slowly picked-up our broken hearts and
discerned how to move forward with our eldest son Zek who was barely 4 years
old at that time. Wanting to spend more time with him, intent in sharing our
own and shared family values and for lack of any Catholic educational
institution in our host country, we searched for options, found a few choices
and ultimately decided to home-school our son.
We had a great time learning lessons together, making it fun
and creative. Despite living in a foreign land, Zek learned a lot about our
Filipino culture specially our religious belief while taking advantage in
learning other things around him. We use lots of Legos, game boards and
materials that can be interactive to help us to have more fun in learning.
Admittedly, making every lesson interesting to Zek was really a great challenge
for us every time. He’s unending questions wore off our energy and our patience
so we needed a lot of time out just to gain back our strength to finish our
daily tasks. Praying together everyday is what makes us at peace together and
helped us persevere.
Zek is more of a visual learner with an entertainment type of
personality. We needed to prepare a lot of drawings, posters or visual aids for
each topic and we did a lot of art works together that all our walls around the
house are filled with hanging papers. We looked for his activities related to
his lessons for the mastery of his skills. We visited museums, watched theater
plays and frequented theme parks. We also enrolled him to a music class for he
loves to sing. We also encouraged him to write about every event that he
attended to or any outdoor activities he did into his blog site from www.zeksantos.ph to www.readyzekaim.blogspot.com for this is one of our way to keep
track of his amazing journey in learning besides making his portfolio with his
progress reports to be submitted quarterly.
After more than 7 years of homeschooling, we still ask the
same question to ourselves every now and then especially during tough times
teaching our eldest son. For now, he has started his Grade 7 in a traditional
school because we feel he needed to learn and experience a real-world
educational environment and to learn to deal with different kinds of people and
situations too. We also decided to build our own house away from the city to improve
our lingering health concerns like endless asthma attacks, sinusitis, rhinitis
and the host of other pollution-related allergies.
Now that our youngest son Aim has turned 5 years old and is a
preschooler, we are leaning towards independent home-schooling based on his
learning pattern and do his lessons according to his interest. Aim is showing
skills as an auditory learner with organizer type of personality and he loves
to read books. With God’s guidance, we will hopefully journey with him as well
throughout his young learning life.
We are always thankful and grateful to God for all
the amazing years of home schooling journey of our family. After all, enjoying while working
together with our kids is always a mutually learning experience we look forward
to.
May God bless us all.
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