As someone that grew up attending public school, homeschooling my children wasn’t something I ever saw myself doing. Society has ingrained it in folks that you have to attend school to be socialized. I believed it to some extent as well even though my school experiences weren’t always fabulous.
Our children have attended private school as well as public school. I also have volunteered and worked at the local public school.
We decided as a family that the traditional school system was not the right fit for our family. By the time we came to that conclusion, I actually wasn’t worried about socialization whatsoever. All three of our older children are very active in extracurricular activities, we have some great friends, and they attended church events for youth. All these things provide the much needed socialization children need.
With that said, I started to wonder if there was more we could do with them to get their nose out of the books, eyes off screens, and out of our home to learn about the world around them with first hand experiences. I came to the conclusion (especially with so many of my friends & family members homeschooling) that we needed to form some sort of group.
I reached out to a couple friends that I knew would be amazing in helping to form something like this as well as managing it. We discussed how we saw this group working and decided to go for it!
So here is what we did:
- We started a private Facebook group.
- We invited friends/family that we felt would be a great fit.
- We quickly realized we needed to have a cap on the amount of families in the group. Even before we did any activities, the excitement led to people inviting others to the group. We knew that we needed to have a manageable sized group for field trips, activities, etc.
- We created a poll among the members on what days and times would be best for everyone to meet up.
- We had in person meetings to introduce everyone to each other, to go over the purpose of the group, brainstorm ideas, and get everything started.
- We began planning!
We quickly realized that there are so many things locally for our families to do. We live in a beautiful area filled with amazing trails for hiking and exploring. We have so much local history that many people didn’t even realize was around us or just never took the time to go learn about. We also had some folks in our group that had experience in youth sports, so we started a weekly P.E. class. The possibilities were quite frankly endless of what we could do with this group.
We started out the first meetup with soccer and kickball for the kids. It was a huge success. We followed that up with a hike and lunch on a popular local trail. We didn’t stop there though. We took the kids to a local historical fossil site in search of fossils. The kids have been having so much fun, learning, staying physically active, and building friendships with kids outside of their normal circle.
An unexpected blessing that came with forming this group is the weekly time spent with other homeschool moms. It was something I think most of us didn’t even realize we needed. It is truly so amazing to be able to talk to other moms. Having others to bounce ideas off of, ask questions, seek advice, or just be able to laugh over the craziness of homeschool. Honestly, after the first couple meet ups I felt even more excited about this group for the simple fact that I had adults that I now looked forward to seeing each week outside of my regular circle of friends.
So if you haven’t started a homeschool group already, I suggest you get started, you won’t regret it.
Krista Stauffer
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