Homeschool Decisions!!

If you don't homeschool, you may not realize just how many decisions are involved with homeschooling! Public school parents have it all layed out for them: This is when your kid starts school, and this is what we are teaching them. Easy. Homeschool parents have to decide MANY things: At what age should we start formal schooling? What curriculums or resources are we going to use? Should we school year-round, or follow a traditional school calender? The list goes on!

These choices are a big part of what most homeschool parents like - the fact that WE are in charge of our children's education, we can tailor things to work for our unique child/family, and we can change things up if they are no longer working!

So, with all of that being said, I am trying to decide when to start Kindergarten with Kadance, Cole, and Hayden. They will turn 5 years old on March 5th. In our area, the public school cut-off date, is February 28th. They missed the cut off for Kindergarten by 5 days. So, if they were to go to public school, they would go this coming September, when they are exactly 5 1/2 years old.


My original plan was to stick to the local school cut-off dates, and start the triplets on Kindergarten this coming Fall. There was NO WAY they would have been ready for Kindergarten this past Fall, and I was perfectly happy that they missed the cut off date, and the decision was out of my hands. Now however, I am SURE that we will be homeschooling them for Kindergarten, and I am starting to toss around other ideas.......

I have figured out which curriculums we are going to be using for Kindergarten, and I have ordered 3/4 of them already! SO, now I have started to think about possibly starting on Kindergarten in January! One of the wonderful things about homeschooling, is that we can start a new school year whenever we want, and we can take as long as we want to do a "year". If I start in January, we can work slowly, spend a year and a half doing Kindergarten if necessary, and really cement in the concepts before starting Grade 1. On the other hand, we still have a bunch of preschool stuff we are working on, and a bunch of preschool resources (workbooks and such) that we really "should" try to use up before moving onto K.

So, at this point, I am undecided. I plan on ordering the rest of our Kindergarten stuff, so that I have it either way. I am weighing the pros and cons of both options, and I would LOVE any input from other homeschoolers, and even non-homeschoolers! :)