Benefits of homeschooling

I was just thinking about the Science Fair that I helped Lydia organize and it got me to thinking about how homeschooling is a perfect way to teach our children that if you want something, the best way to get it is to go out and do it yourself and not to wait for someone to hand it to you.

Lydia and I were talking a few months back about how we wanted our children to take part in a science fair. At the time there was no science fair for homeschoolers in Hampton Roads and more importantly, science fairs are generally for older children than our 4. We realized that if we wanted our children to take part in a homeschool science fair that we would have to organize one ourselves. So that is exactly what we did. In about 6 weeks, we arranged a pilot science fair for 30 kids.

Our children were with us all the way. They listened to us do the planning, they heard us while we spoke to sponsors and more importantly they heard us agonizing over how to do things.

Today Shira and Ben were talking about needing something and they came to the conclusion that they would just have to make it themselves. Ben then realized that they had no idea how to make it but Shira's response was, "Ben, it doesn't matter if we don't know how to make it. We can work it out. Look how mom and Lydia worked out how to put on a science fair".

I can't begin to tell you how happy I was. Our kids are learning to be self sufficient and to be unafraid of trying new things.

Next year Lydia and I intend opening the science fair to the entire Hampton Roads homeschooling community. I can't wait to see what lessons our children take from that. They'll see how we started small, capitalized on our successes, learned from our mistakes and then went on to even bigger things.

Who needs "take your kids to work day", when you can homeschool your children and they can see on a daily basis how adults do things.