Homeschooling Success

By Linda Dobson (and especially for Alissa Walkoviak, soon-to-be first time mom)

When living and learning blend, both are transformed, and the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

Homeschooling is not just an exciting idea of freedom in education, it’s a successful one, too. In 1995 the Riverside Publishing Company released the Iowa Basic Achievement Test scores of 16,000 home-educated students. This is one of several standardized tests commonly administered in schools. Children taught at home averaged in the 77th percentile, 27 percent above what the testing company deems average ability.

University of Florida College of Education doctoral student Larry Shyers used the Piers-Harris Self Concept Scale and compared scores of traditionally schooled children and those who learn at home. In this test, the homeschoolers again came out on top. It’s not much, but research like this may come in handy someday when discussing your journey with the in-laws.

Homeschooling Is More than Academics

While good test scores, both academic and social, provide important indications of homeschooling‘s success, they are only a small part of a bigger picture. More abundant and meaningful is the empirical evidence you can only get from those experiencing homeschooling. It’s from these sources you’ll find that a homeschooling learning journey doesn’t just involve your child’s head. While they may have initially turned to homeschooling for its superior academic results, these travelers have unearthed a treasure far greater than they imagined – the equally ppositive effects the homeschool learning journey has on a child’s heart as well.

Once you start learning where you live – and living where you learn – the artificial lines between them grow less defined and, for the fortunate, fade away. When living and learning blend, both are transformed, and the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. This living/learning blend can never occur in an institution. It’s available only from home, the most love-filled environment accessible to any of us. Living and learning together, homeschooling families nurture the whole child, head and heart, in a comfortable, warm, and secure setting.

P.S. My Homeschooling Journey

I now have two homeschooled children out in the world and a “baby” eagerly anticipating receipt of his driver’s license in just a few months. Reading the stories generously shared by homeschoolers with early years children opened a floodgate of memories. Those days of learning at home with children aged three to eight were laced with high energy and innocent wonder. Long walks picking blueberries, spending the entire Wednesday before preparing our Thanksgiving feast, bundling up and driving down to the potato fields late at night for the best view of an eclipse; life’s simple pleasures I feel blessed to have shared with three of the most wonderful people in the world.

I know the memories I’ll cherish for the rest of my life wouldn’t exist if not for homeschooling. “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the one less traveled by,” wrote Robert Frost, “And that has made all the difference.”

May your journey make all the difference, too.

See also “It Doesn’t Matter Where You Begin Homeschooling; Just Begin!”

Adapted from Homeschooling the Early Years: Your Complete Guide to Successfully Homeschooling the 3- to 8-Year-Old Child by Linda Dobson

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