Are You Considering Home Education in NC?

Home education has been a core value of our family since before the birth of our first child. From his first moments outside the womb, teaching Gavin about the world and his role in it has been one of our family's greatest joys and most important responsibilities. Amy and I strongly believe that the task of educating a child falls squarely to that child's family — parents, siblings, grandparents, and so on, natural, adoptive, or otherwise. The family is the building block of society, and where the family and its members are ill-equipped, society is weakened.

In our family, which now includes two school-aged children, that means taking advantage of the opportunity for Amy to formally educate those children in our home. To assist in this task, we are members of a larger community of families in our area who have made similar choices, the Cabarrus County Home School Association. We've been actively involved in the CCHSA for over two years now, and greatly enjoy the benefits of this local homeschooling support group.

If you're considering home education in North Carolina, and you'll be in or around Concord, NC on Monday, October 25, 2010, you may wish to check out the CCHSA's public Informational Meeting. Here's a snippet from an email notification we received about the meeting:

Hi! I wanted to let everyone know that our first CCHSA Informational Meeting will be held on Monday, Oct. 25th at 7PM at the West Cabarrus YMCA on George Liles Blvd. We will have speakers talking about the "why" of homeschooling, what to know about homeschooling in North Carolina and in Cabarrus County, what resources are available to help homeschoolers, and a variety of "special topics" for a Q and A session.

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The Q and A speakers will be answering questions about things such as sports opportunities, advantages/disadvantages to various specific curricula, how to prepare high school students for college, how to help special needs learners, or how to juggle multiple ages/grades.

For a map to the event location, click here.

To be clear, Amy and I don't believe that the public school system is evil. We don't believe that parents who choose to avail themselves of public education are negligent or failing their children in some way. Many of our dearest friends work every day to ensure that public education in our area is the best that it can be. Our challenge to all families is simple and universal: take ownership of your children's education, and use the best mechanisms and approaches and services you can to do so.

Surprise Beach Mini-vacation

Hearing the excitement in two young boys' voices when they learn that the family is going to take a four-day vacation to the beach is one thing. But hearing that excitement when they learn this fact as you pull into the parking lot of an oceanfront pier takes it to a whole new level!

Last Tuesday, Amy whisked the boys out of the house early in the morning for a quick errand to her parents' place while I sneakily dropped fully packed suitcases into the trunk of our other car. Upon their return, she and I announced to the kids that we'd be taking a field trip. What we didn't tell them was that the "field trip" was to be a four-day excursion to North Myrtle Beach.

Amy had the boys' schoolwork all prepared, and they spent the first two hours of our three-and-a-half hour journey doing that work: reading books aloud to each other, taking math and science tests, etc. When they'd finished their work, they naturally began to wonder just how far away this secret field trip location was, but were easily distracted into various other activities — more reading, drawing and coloring pictures, imaginative play, etc. Our ruse became more difficult as we neared our destination, with nearly every highway sign screaming out the number of miles remaining to Myrtle Beach or North Myrtle Beach. But we managed to keep up the distractions until we finally pulled into the parking lot of the Cherry Grove Beach pier. Ocean in full view, our sons finally realized where we were. And then we told them we'd be staying for a while.

The weather was cloudy or rainy for most of the trip. Some would call that unfortunate, but in reality it was wonderful. The air and ocean water were warm enough to enjoy comfortably. The rains held off every time we got into the mood to go down to the ocean. We never had to fuss with sunscreen. We never had to deal with heat exhaustion. It was just perfect! I got rained on only once when I intentionally went for a four-mile jog in the rain on Wednesday morning while Amy and the boys did their schoolwork for the day. (It was a great jog, by the way, dribbling a soccer ball up and down the coastline, playing keep-away with the surf!) We were able to visit resort's indoor pools every night of our stay except for the final one, which we spent treating the boys to a surprise trip to Medieval Times.

The boys had a surprise for us, too, it seems. The first night that we visited the pools, both boys started swimming a bit on their own without flotation devices! That provided many hours of excitement for the family, and quite a bit less fatigue than usual for Amy and I.

And the aforementioned resort offered its own lovely (if geeky) surprise. When I visited the hotel's community computer system to print off our tickets for Medieval Times, I found that it was powered by none other than Ubuntu Linux (a free operating system and extremely viable alternative to Microsoft Windows and MacOSX)!

Truthfully, there's very little to not have been thrilled about on this trip. We left Friday morning (our first sunny day), drove further south to Surfside Beach for some seashell hunting and beach soccer, and then aimed our car toward home, very thankful to have had such a wonderfully relaxing family vacation.

Parents, when was the last time you took your family away from it all for a bit of respite? Make and take those opportunities now before your kids are grown and your family dispersed!