Tuesday, January 17, 2017

Small City Homeschooling Introduction

Yay! My first post!

I feel like it'd make sense if my first post discusses the difficulties that come along with homeschooling in a small city. We live 100 miles away from a big city, so it's not like we can just pick up and go to a cool homeschooling thing. One issue is that I'm not from this area. I moved here because this was where my husband's job was, so I am not familiar with this state at all.

"Well, get a GPS!" you may say. We have one, dear reader, but it is dumb and stupid and doesn't work 98% of the time. It came built into our truck and half the time doesn't even point in the right direction or the arrow will point down instead of up. There are no verbal directions other than "You have now reached your destination," two minutes after I've found the place (no thanks to the dumb GPS!) and parked. Since we are working with one income and scraping by, getting a new one is not an option.

There are two museums here. Both of them are boring, both of them we've already been to. There is one movie theater that doesn't have a great selection.

We're in the Bible Belt and there is ONE co-op group for our location but members HAVE to be Christian and the moms HAVE to contribute at least one class per month. Now, I was thinking we could lie about being Christian *sneaky laugh* but one thing I can't fake is a class. I don't even know what I'm doing with my own kid, how can I be expected to have the education of dozens of other people's children in my hands?! What would I teach?! I am the opposite of organized, so I don't think I'd be able to handle putting together some elaborate educational event.

My daughter did Heart and Sole, which is a program for middle school girls to prepare for and eventually run a 5k marathon. She loved it, but it is now over. So now what?

There is a dance class, but she is nervous about dancing in front of an audience. One person teaches tennis, but she has no interest. There's an art class but it costs too much money.

And that's about all there is here.

My poor little one gets so bored sometimes and I wish that I could do something about it. I shortly considered starting my own homeschool group, but how on earth would I do that? And also, please refer to an earlier paragraph when it was mentioned how unorganized I am.

So enough of this woe is me business. ;) Please tell me we aren't the only ones going through this. There have to be others living in small cities and struggling to find things for the kiddos to do!

3 comments:

  1. Hi, Tiffani! We haven't lived in a small town before, but we have lived in a town with limited activities and such. Thank you for sharing with us what small town homeschooling looks like.

    In both towns we have lived in, I started a homeschool group. I don't start them to teach classes, but instead we do fun stuff together. Our groups are not for academics. We have game days, go bowling, do art lessons, and activities like that together. It's more about community building. I feel you on teaching classes. If you want help with starting a group, shoot me an email.

    I am teaching an art class on Outschool if you are interested. You can go to bit.ly/latonyaos to find me. There are other classes there too.

    Looking forward to following you on your journey! I shared your geography post on my FB page, Joy in the Ordinary.

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    Replies
    1. Hi there, Latonya! It never occurred to me to start a group just for fun! I figured it had to be all academics, all the time! I feel so silly. LOL. But yay, I feel so hopeful now!

      Thanks so much for your offer, I will definitely be emailing you about that! And thank you again for sharing my post, I'm thrilled you enjoyed it enough to share!

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