How To Homeschool: Your Mission Statement Part 3

As homeschooling has become more popular, choices abound for how homeschoolers can choose to learn. In the early days of Christian homeschooling, for example, only Christian curriculum providers were willing to sell their products to homeschoolers. Now a wide variety of non-Christian and Christian curriculum are available. You can choose from commercial curriculum packages from curriculum developers or the curricula of many homeschool moms and dads publishing in their areas of expertise. Homeschool resources are available in a variety of formats including online, DVD and audio with lots of hands-on options.

How can you possibly know what to choose if you are not certain of your homeschool goals and mission statement?

I definitely had this problem when I first began homeschooling. I was susceptible to every new ad for a curriculum that came in my e-mail inbox or a speech or workshop that I heard from a curriculum author or read about in a homeschool magazine. I spent a fair amount of money in those early days, piecing together curriculum, books and hands-on materials from a wide variety of sources. This was ultimately frustrating as I knew it could not be good for me or my son to keep flipping around. We wasted time this way and the bottom line was my son could have been learning much more in those years if we had a family mission statement to guide us in our choice of homeschool materials.

Ultimately, we decided that teaching our children about the love of Christ through the Bible was our top value for our homeschool. This helped me to greatly narrow my curriculum picks. Less frustration for me and more learning for our "guinea pig", my son. Making a firm decision and sticking to it will bring much peace and a much less restless spirit into your homeschool.