Homeschool Workshop

Navigating Homeschool Choices

Homeschooling Workshop

MCA Santa Clara CA

June 3, 2016

Panelist #1: Shaheen Rasheed - Introduction to Homeschooling

• My name is Shaheen Rasheed and I have four children that I have homeschooled all the way through. I have two now doing the middle college high school route, one in middle school, and one just starting elementary. My journey to homeschooling came about because I was a teacher in the public and private school systems and I realized I couldn’t really fully integrate learning and living, with my family, and I wanted to give my children a different opportunity and that’s why I chose to homeschool.

• But today I want to talk about why you are here. Every single one of you is here because you are interested in education. So it’s best we begin with a definition of terms. So what is education? Education comes from the latin word educatio - to lead out, to bring up, to nurture. In the Arabic education is also a two prong term: both Tarbiya and Ta’leem. We live in a time and place where education has become only secular learning and the other part of our being is being ignored. In order to raise our children for life AND living, giving them ta’leem along with tarbiya, we need to look at creating a lifelong learner by raising them in a holistic fashion.

• Howard Gardner’s Multiple intelligence theory, you can read his book: He talks about how each person has many types of intelligences. The four main types of intelligences are spiritual, intellectual, physical and socio-emotional. When we put our child in school, private or public, we are not really able to address and teach all the intelligences. Therefore there is an imbalance. We are the middle Ummah, the ummah of balance. We want to raise a holistic human being. We are educating a trust, an amanah from Allah.

• There is a right time for the optimal growth and development of each of these intelligences. In the rush to excellence, we forget about developing the physical. We forget about the socio-emotional and we focus mostly on intellectual. And the spiritual, forget about it completely the education system has separated Church and state, therefore no school is allowed to teach about God. Before the intellectual can be developed, what has to be developed in a child is their physical and socio-emotional intelligence. Companies are saying, we have these brilliant engineers but they can’t work with each other, why? Well we haven’t developed those core skills that need to be developed early on. You can always learn later. You can always pick up a book of Algebra and learn Algebra at the age of 25 or 30, and sometimes it’s even better. But learning how to share, how to give, its much harder to learn that at age 25, 30, and we’re seeing that with the youth that are now becoming adults.

• Homeschooling is the fastest growing model of education today. It started off generations ago. The founding fathers of this country and the royal families across the globe, the Moguls, the British aristocracy, none of them sent their children to school, they had people coming into their home to teach them. So homeschooling is not new. So I don’t want you to think that this is something new. This movement has always been going on. There are two million students today in the US that are homeschooled. It is not a fringe thing. More and more people are checking out from whatever is existing now and turning towards homeschooling.

• What is homeschooling? It is parents taking charge of their own children’s learning. Teaching on your own terms. It does not mean you individually teaching every single thing to your child all the time. It is about you facilitating their learning. You taking charge of their curriculum. You making the decisions about what pressures you want to expose them to or not. It is about you taking charge of your child’s upbringing and education. That is what homeschooling is.

• Another psychologist I want to mention is Abraham Maslow, who has written about the hierarchy of needs. He says our goal as human beings is self-actualization: where you are the best you can be. If you take a refugee child who has no sense of physical safety, no sense of belonging, a self esteem that has been crushed - you cannot expect them to grow up to be a wonderful self actualized adult. It’s an unfair expectation. These are all barriers to education. Transfer that to the public school system - Do our children feel physically safe? Chances are no, because they don’t know who at what point will point a gun at them. What about their emotional safety? Harassment, bullying. Then what about their self esteem, where Muhammad will change his name to Mo rather than use one of the most honorable names? Their self esteem is damaged. Then we expect our children, above all of this, to rise about this and get into Berkeley, get into MIT and do all of this. Are our expectations even real or justified? That’s something to think about.

• The environment outside has become super toxic. And as Muslims it is getting even harder. Technology has taken over every aspect of our lives. It is speeding and it is changing how things affect our children as well. They are not living for themselves as much as they are living for social media a lot of times. And materialism, it is pumped into our psyche constantly. Be aware of all these barriers to education. These are what you are trying to eliminate when you want to take control over their education.

• Why do people want to homeschool?
• Moral religious grounding. Keeping God as the center of learning, keeping God as the center of your home. That is the primary reason a lot of people choose to homeschool. And that is why we have such a large Christian homeschooling community in this country, they were the first ones to check out of the school system and homeschool their kids.
• Academic relevancy. If your child is extremely smart and is waiting in a classroom with others who are still trying to catch up, they are bored. If you child is having difficulty learning material that has been taught and everyone has moved ahead, they will left behind. The classroom is not meant to take every student. Regardless of how much they say no child left behind, some will be left behind, and some will be bored.
• Stronger family bonds. If you have children in different grades they do not get to spend time with each other, they do not get to speak to each other, and you do not get to speak to them much. But being in your home with all your children with you, stronger bonds are developed.
• Safe environment.
• Time for other activities. An average school day is 6-8 hours long. An average homeschool day is 4 hours long. Why? Because you are not trying to get the attention of 30 students, you have 1:1 attention, you get through the material much quicker. Most homeschoolers pursue hobbies and learn things that others don’t in schools. The one group that is homeschooled from the beginning in the US, are actors or musicians, because they knew that those children are going to pursue their talents and interests and schooling should not stand in their way. In our community, the largest number of homeschoolers are those who have children in a Hifz program. Why? Because schooling does not accommodate you doing something else. Being able to put priority to memorizing Qur’an, means you have to let something go. And that flexibility comes from homeschooling. Sometimes, I even see older students, especially middle and high schoolers, asking to be homeschooled, because they have gone through the system. I have been an education consultant for the past 10 years, working with families nationally and internationally, and I see this all the time.

• There are several options for homeschooling that we are going to expose you to tonight. All of them are 100% legal in every state in this country.
• Independent: the family chooses to check out of the system. Basically you submit one paper to the CA dept of education online, and that’s it. Sr. Maria Ali is going to talk more about this style.
• Semi-independent: The more commonly used option, the homeschooling charter schools. Delta Empire, Connecting waters, Ocean grove, these are some of the names, but they are all basically the same depend on which county you live in. Sr. Mona Eid and Sr. Muna Bashir will talk about two of the charters.
• Dependent: This is the method where the curriculum and everything is given to you, the K12 method. Sr. Fatima Walker will talk about this method.

• Some take-aways: that Homeschooling is legal, is available to you, and you can do it.

• I want to introduce to you Sr. Maria Ali, she is a dear friend of mine, I have worked with her and I have known her for years. She has homeschooled ma sha Allah 3 children. All three of them in college or beyond college. She has one Hafiz, one PhD, and one successful college graduate. All of them under 26 years of age. She has done this and survived all three kids, and she has homeschooled in multiple states.

Panelist #2: Maria Ali - Independent Homeschool Option

• My name is Maria Ali and I have 3 children. We have homeschooled primarily with the independent method. There was one year where we used a homeschool charter school, for my son that is the hafiz, because he had a speech impediment and his therapy was expensive. But that was just a short time then we went back to homeschooling independently.

• To register as independent, in the fall you go online and you fill out a form that takes about five minutes. The hardest part of the form is deciding on a name for your school, because you are registering yourself as a private school. CA is interesting in that there is no specific homeschooling statute - you are either in a public school or a private school. It is perfectly legal here to set yourself up as a private school. We named our school Morning Light Academy. My husband is the administrator and I am the principal. You have to keep a couple forms, very easy, and you are done.

• You are free to teach your children the way you want, where you want, and what you want. The curriculum you want, the days you want. You can test or you don’t have to ever test them. You can have a strict schedule or you can go with the flow. That’s your choice. Because life happens. We had multiple moves across the country, there was a period where I was in and out of the hospital for two years, and none of that affected my children’s education negatively. Because we had the freedom to go with the flow, take a month off if we had to, go to Egypt for six months because we were doing a unit study on the pyramids so let’s go see them. This is the freedom that independent study gives you.

• This is how it happened. We were living in Wisconsin and they were going to a very small Islamic school, I used to teach there. One day my oldest was about 6, they had their uniforms on, they had their lunchboxes and we were all set to go for the 20 minute drive to the school. The sun was shining, the clouds were wispy, I looked at my kids, I looked at the sky, and I said, ‘We’re going to the zoo! Change your clothes, we’re going.’ So we spent the day at the zoo. And my kids learned more in that one day at the zoo than they would have learned at school. And there was nothing wrong with that school it was a perfectly fine school I used to teach there, and that’s how I knew that they learned more on that one day at the zoo than at school. Because the school was like most schools in that it had a very strict rigid curriculum that you had to follow. It did not allow for - ‘look at this elephant, let’s look at it for 2 hours, subhan Allah look at how Allah created this elephant.’ At the end of the school year my kids had the worst attendance record in the school and we knew it was time to leave. There just wasn’t a question.

• I was blessed to have mentors in the community who were pioneers. This was in the mid 1990s. There were no charters or K12. We ate tofu and granola and it was glorious. There were 2 families in our homeschooling group and we did a lot of activities together. But we had a mentality that is wonderful - that everything is an opportunity for learning, that you can learn anywhere with anyone, there’s always something to be learned, always someone to learn from. We always exposed our children to a wide range of people. We were always going here and there. Someone would call and say, ‘My uncle is a veterinarian and there was a baby calf that had died and we were going to find out how it died’, so we all went out to the farm as fast as we could. Or someone would say ‘I am a glass blower and make instruments for laboratories, who wants to come learn how to blow glass?’ We were actually home very little.

• We did very little paperwork in the beginning. And yes they all learned to read, they all learned to write, that wasn’t a problem, but we didn’t focus on that. The image of everyone sitting at a table with workbooks open and mom sitting with a chalkboard, that did not happen in our house. Maybe later when the kids got older. But not those first crucial 5, 6 years of learning, we were out a lot. There is a great bumper sticker that says ‘If they call it homeschooling then why are we never at home?’ There is a lady that sells all kinds of materials for kids called CarSchooling - tapes and all kinds of things for kids to do in the car.

• We were very eclectic homeschoolers. We did what needed to be done at the time and went with how things were going. When something wasn’t working we changed. When my kids got in highschool we had all sorts of opportunities. All my children got to college. My daughter completed her undergraduate by age 19 then did her PhD at Berkeley and now she works at Livermore labs as a Physicist. The next one down is a Project Manager at UCLA he is 23. And the baby we call him Hafiz Yusuf, has just finished his first year at Ohlone College and he is going to major in Cognitive Science.

• It is all from Allah it’s not from me. Allah made it all possible. But I want to just say to you that you CAN do it, all of you can do it, if you want, and your families will benefit. My children have said, ‘If Allah blesses us with children we plan to homeschool them the way you homeschool us because they are very grateful.’ They say ‘Thank you for not sending us to school because we never would have learned what we did, we never would have done what we did, we never would have met the people that we met or gotten to know each other.’ My kids are close to each other and they are close to us, alhamdulillah, and that is just the biggest blessing of all. Jazakum Allahu khair.

Panelist #3: Mona Eid - Homeschooling Charter School Option, Ocean Grove

• My name is Mona Eid and I am a mother of 5 alhamdulillah - I have a daughter in high school, a son in middle school, and three sons in elementary. It is indeed a blessing from Allah to be able to homeschool, but it is a difficult path. We believe that Allah has called us to take matters literally into our own hands! We try not to look at the short term difficulties, but rather focus on our long term goals of raising righteous individuals who can be leaders and innovators and lead the society to success, and the ultimate goal of Jannah. We need to do what we can now when they are young, this is our time to make an impact.

• My Homeschooling journey. I first heard about homeschooling when my oldest child was about a year old. I saw a friend of mine and I asked her what school she put her children in and to my surprise she said she home schools them. I had never heard about this before, but from the first minute I knew that I wanted to try it. Especially because I had many unpleasant experiences when I was in school. Though I was born in Lebanon, I grew up in Boston MA, there were no islamic schools at that time, so I went to public schools. I personally know what children deal with in public schools.

• Now, my daughter was still very young, but I was really curious about how this works, so I started reading books and I was excited to try it. When she was about to start first grade, we finally decided to try homeschooling for one year and see how it is. And each year we ended up deciding to continue for another year. And now it’s been 9 years, and I now have five children, alhamdulillah.

• When I started homeschooling I was in the Boston area, there was only the independent option. So I was independent for 3 years and was using Calvert curriculum with teacher support. Then Allah blessed us to move to Santa Clara CA and here I met some homeschoolers and they told me about the charter school option. So I enrolled with Connecting Waters and I was with them for 3 years. Then I had heard about K12 and I decided to try it. I was with K12 for two years. Then some opportunities came up and we decided to put our children in morning Qur’an classes, we started having a time conflict with K12 classes. So then we switched to Ocean Grove Charter School, because I am in South Bay and their resource center is closer. I have been with Ocean Grove for 2 years.

• Charter School Overview. CA is one of the few states in the entire country that has charter schools with such home study programs. For new homeschoolers, these charter schools make it easier and more affordable to homeschool. With the funds that are available to you, you can choose the newest innovative curriculums out there and also be able to get private tutors or small group classes - depending on the need of each child and their learning style.

• There are two main charter schools for Santa Clara area: Ocean Grove and Connecting Waters. They are Independent free public charter school funded by the state where the parent is the main teacher. Each family is assigned ONE Educational Specialist (ES) who will be the guide for all of your school aged children. If your oldest is high school, you will get a high school credentialed teacher. If your oldest is middle school, you will get a middle school credentialed teacher. She meets with you once a month to see all your children’s work, collect samples, and give you any support you need. These schools give you funding, around $2000 a year. You can use these funds to purchase books, kits, supplies, laptop, classes, or tutoring. You email your ES your orders and you receive them the next month meeting. They also have a resource center where you can borrow books and kits for free. Or you can ask your ES to look for certain items for you and she can bring them for you.

• What I like about the Charter school option is the funding, which is especially useful for middle school and high school students, because you can use it for tutors and classes. This year I used Club Z tutoring, Academic Antics, and MCA Academic Tutoring. I like that I only have one ES for all my children to deal with. It saves me time with all the emails going back and forth. I like that she can meet me at my home so that when she is talking to one of my children, my other children can be continuing their work in their rooms. I really like the flexibility that the charter option offers that I am not tied to a certain time amount, or curriculum, or place, or device. I can individualize my children’s learning based on their learning styles. It fosters independence which is good preparation for college. I don’t have to worry about common core or state testing until 3rd grade. I like that my children don’t have to take meaningless tests and quizzes, which enables them to love learning and learn things they are interested in.

• Homeschool goals. When I first started homeschooling, I had the goals of protecting my children from negative influences, bullying, information that is not beneficial, information that is biased, information that is not in line with our values, and more importantly for them to have more time for Arabic, Qur'an, and Islamic studies. I also wanted for the kids to maintain their Arabic speaking, to have more time with their father, to be attached to the masjid and be able to attend Fajr and Isha and socialize with other children whose families were also attached to the masjid - I wanted those kind of friends for my children. And I wanted to equip them with the life skills and character traits they will need to be successful in their lives (and not just careers) and also successful in the hereafter.

• But through the years, especially after the wars and the Islamophobia, we decided that our main goal of homeschooling is to create righteous Islamic Scholars with leadership skills, in order to be a force of good in the world to counter the evil and to solve the conflicts of the local community, the country, and the world. We need more righteous people in the world. We can do something about what is going on the world.

• Homeschooling allows more time for Qur’an. If you are truly concerned about your child's career success, you should go back to the way the Muslim inventors, mathematicians, doctors, and scientists were raised in the golden age of Islam. They were first and foremost students of Islamic knowledge and went through deep study of the Quran- and it was the Qur'an that inspired them to go into the fields of study they then pursued. Allah created this world and everything and everyone in it, then He surely gave us a manual and a guide to help us understand everything around us. The Qur'an is the key. Going back to the memorization and deep study and application of it will be the key to success in this world and the hereafter. Let us raise children who are not just good doctors or good engineers or good professors, but rather leaders and pioneers and revolutionaries in the fields of medicine, law, education, engineering, science, and all fields of study, and who are an embodiment of the Qur'an and Sunnah in character, deeds, family and career. If you want a different generation, you need to do something different.

• May Allah facilitate for us this path we have chosen and make it easy on us and give us success in dunya and akhirah. May Allah guide us to what is best and help us raise righteous leaders in sha Allah. Jazakum Allahu khairan.

Panelist # 4 : Muna Bashir, Homeschooling Charter School Option, Connecting Waters

• My name is Muna Bashir and I have 3 children: a high schooler, a middle schooler, and a little guy who keeps us very busy, and is not yet of formal school age. I am using Connecting Waters for both my older children as of now. We have primarily used the independent format of homeschooling from the very outset, with a couple of exceptions that I will mention as we go. With Connecting Waters, there are two main things that attract us for our family’s homeschooling. One is that they offer a mobile science lab. It is a van that has a lab built inside it and it is run by a husband-wife team. The husband is the instructor, and the wife assists during the labs. They travel around the city and provide labs for middle schoolers and high schoolers. I believe it allows about 6 students inside the lab. So, this small student-teacher ratio really allows the children to thrive and engage with the instructor, and to really learn and have fun as they learn. The other attraction was their a-g online classes, which are college prep classes for homeschoolers. My high schooler really enjoys the freedom to be able to take her classes online at her own pace. We could be travelling anywhere, and all she needs is an internet connection to take her classes. So, that is a great benefit for us through Connecting Waters. The other thing it allows us to do, is to have both of my girls in the Noor Hifz program for homeschoolers at MCA in the mornings. Like Sr. Maria mentioned, you have a lot of freedom - depending upon which option you go with - to incorporate other things into your day-to-day schedules which you may not otherwise have due to time limits if your children are in school all day. They also offer an afternoon tutoring service 3 days a week with teachers from NorthStar and Averroes, so that is another option for your children if you want to use it for after-school tutoring for Language Arts and Math - and also Science.

• Three things that I feel you may find interesting about our family’s homeschooling are as follows... One, we travel and move a lot. We have never really been in one city for more than 3 years, and we’ve been doing this for 15 years. So the one thing that has been constant for our children and for us as a family has been our homeschooling. That is what grounds us and allows us to know each other and be connected to each other, in spite of what life brings us.

• Two, we’ve utilized multiple resources in every city we have lived in. So don’t limit yourself. You can utilize and tap into many resources - the local public schools, private schools, islamic schools, community centers, etc. Alhamdulillah, we have MCA here - there are so many people here and so many resources. You have to think outside the box. Homeschooling allows you the freedom to experiment, to be creative, and to really explore with your children next to you.

• Thirdly, from a very early age we put a focus on learning multiple languages. In addition to that, proper Qur’an recitation with tajweed. When my child was very young and she wasn’t of formal school age, I started hosting and organizing playgroups. For example, when we were in Montreal, Quebec, the moms attending the playgroups spoke Arabic, English, French, and Urdu. We had an hour-long playgroup. So, for the first 20 minutes, we would run the playgroup entirely in French. Then the next 20 minutes it would be run in Arabic. The next 20 minutes it would be in English. So the moms and children were getting exposed to something very interesting and unique at a very young age. We had the psychological freedom to be creative with our children and think outside the box because we weren’t worrying about which school we were going to enroll them in one or two years down the line. This is just something we came together and did, while thinking how can we make this fun for the children and help them to be the best they can possibly be. And keep in mind that this can be different for each child.

• I homeschooled my first daughter through grade 1, but when I had my second child, it was getting a bit overwhelming for me. My husband had recently enrolled in a PhD program and wasn’t present very much at home, and I had a little baby to deal with. My older daughter was about to enter grade 2, and we started wondering what to do. So we actually moved cities for a private Islamic school that we really wanted to try out. We tried it and liked it. It allowed us to tap into a wonderful community resource. But ultimately, we decided that homeschooling was the best option for our child and for our family. Our daughter asked to be homeschooled once again. For her, the only thing was, ‘as long as I can have my friends and my socialization, I’d rather be home schooled.’ She told me ‘I am in grade 3 now, and (honestly) what you taught me in grade 1 Math, I am still covering those concepts in grade 3.’ And this school was maybe in the top 3% in the province at that time. The problem was not the school. Keep in mind that when you are teaching your child one-on-one, you can cover so much versus trying to deal with a group of 30 - and they are not your own children. Just managing them takes up so much of your time. So you need to think about what you want for your child, and what does your child want from their learning? The main thing to keep in mind is not just that they learn, but that they love to learn. Because today you are with them, tomorrow you might not be with them. So you want to teach them to love to learn - and the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic. If they learn the basics and learn them well at the foundational age, then in sha Allah, they can build on that. There are so many resources available now, alhamdulillah, and all of these were not there when I started out about 15 years ago.

• We utilized Arabic immersion resources and weekend Islamic schools. When my daughter was 2½, we had the opportunity to spend 6 months in Egypt. I was not thinking that I would enroll my child in any kind of school at the time, but alhamdulillah, we had the opportunity, it was attractive, and we tried it. Alhamdulillah it was a blessing. My daughter became fluent in the Egyptian dialect by the age of 3 years, and she memorized 14 surahs in three months with proper tajweed. MashaAllah, we would listen to her and correct our recitation from hers at that age. When we came back (and we were in Canada), we thought we need to maintain the Arabic language and we need to maintain her Qur’an. How do we do this? We can’t just enroll her in a public school - or even a private school - and expect to maintain this level and go where we want to with this. So we tried various things. When she was younger, we utilized a weekend Arabic immersion school. When we enrolled her in the private Islamic school, we opted to have her take the native speaker’s Arabic class. For the longest time, the teacher did not have any idea that she was not a native Arabic speaker! Honestly, if you want to maintain a native language - and even with Qur’anic memorization - I find that one day or afternoon a week is not necessarily going to cut it, even for maintenance. After a while, you’ll see the deterioration because your child is in an English speaking society most of the week. So unless your main language is Arabic and you are utilizing Fus’ha Arabic at home, it is not going to happen unless you take a few extra steps. We eventually switched to (private) tutoring, and finally, to online Arabic classes 5 days a week through Studio Arabiya. Alhamdulillah, there are lots of online resources that you can utilize. How well it will work for you depends among many things upon your child, on the teacher you get, and your circumstances, And not everything works for everyone at the same time, and not every option works for every child - even within the same family. So, these are some things to keep in mind.

• When we were in Ottawa (and in Canada, the second language is French), one of the language-learning opportunities we had was when we came across a public school teacher who enjoyed teaching French to homeschoolers after school. So I started taking my daughter to this class, along with several other homeschoolers. It was a wonderful experience. They used a lot of drama and role playing; they learned so much. My second daughter even started doing this program at the age of 3. So they already had their Arabic, and were doing their Tajweed with a private teacher, and we also had this French. Now, even though we’ve moved away and we’ve gone to different cities, we still maintain that French with the same teacher over Skype. So there are so many resources out there for you, it’s just a matter of you picking and choosing what suits you at the time you’re in.

• Another thing is that our native language is Urdu. My husband’s aunt is a language teacher, and she had put together this Urdu learning program for teaching English speakers in North America, which goes through the elementary and middle school years. So we actually got her to teach our children - again, over Skype - once a week, and that would allow us to maintain our native language. Keep in mind that once you start homeschooling, you will probably be using a lot of English. At the preschool age, you don’t have to worry about your children picking up English; they will pick it up. I don’t remember formally teaching my daughter the English language until she was closer to age 4 ½ or 5, and it was never an issue. But languages are amazing. They help build connections in the brain, and they give the children a bridge with which to connect them to other cultures and people - not just in your community but all across the world.

• One thing to keep in mind is that we are going to be judged for our efforts as parents and the results are in the hands of Allah. Sometimes we get so worked up about what choices to make, what should we decide, and what we should do. Ultimately, the results are in the hands of Allah. But it’s our efforts that we are going to be judged on. Jazakum Allahu khair.

Panelist #5: Fatima Walker, K12 (CAVA) Homeschool Option

• I use the K12 program and have used it for the past 5 years. I have two older kids who went through the public school system and I was definitely not happy with that at all. We lost our oldest daughter for a short while to the high school environment, she is back now alhamdulillah but it took a while. My son was able to cope with it.

• But that isn’t why we started homeschooling. When we were in San Francisco, we put our younger daughter in a private school, it was a really good school, good education, no problem, it was just all the other stuff that went with it. So when an opportunity came to put her in an Islamic school down here, we jumped at the chance, packed up our things, and moved down here and put her in school. The education just went straight downhill. So at that stage we decided to homeschool for educational purposes. We weren’t worried about the Qur’an because my husband teaches them Qur’an and Arabic, so that part we were never worried about. But as the years went by, I chose to stay with the program, because I realized something was happening that I never had with my two older kids, I got to know my two younger kids better than my two older kids. I see my older daughter now and sometimes we don’t even know what to talk about and I realize I don’t know her. Whereas my 12 year old and 9 year old, I know them inside and out. I know their likes, their dislikes, and what they think sometimes before they even say it. I know what they want and what they don’t want. And I teach to their styles.

• Yes I choose the K12 program, it is not as flexible as the other ones, but I chose it because I wanted to focus more on my children than worry about having to deal with the schedule and all that. And they do have great teachers. The teachers are there to help you. You can go online with the teachers. You can change it if you want, they had a unit on mythology I said I am not teaching mythology they said that’s fine you don’t have to teach it. I don’t have to worry about the curriculum. If I don’t like a book and I don’t want them to read it, the teacher said fine then don’t, it’s your choice, teach them something else.

• So, I’m not too worried about the education, because I think a child can get an education no matter where they are, public or private, depending on how much the parents put into it. But it was getting to know my kids that makes me stick with it. Even though some days you want to scream and some days you think why am I doing this why have I chosen this path? And when I look and listen to my daughters, and then I see the kids that are outside and how they talk, I say this is why I am doing it.

• I noticed that when I put my daughter in first grade, she stopped sharing. She didn’t share anymore. Why? Because they are told not to share. Which I understand the school saying don’t share but to this day she does not share very well. I look at my 9 year old, and when she has a piece of candy she breaks it in half to give to her sister. It’s these little things that you don’t notice at first when your kids are in school, but you will start noticing them when you are homeschooling.

• Even though K12 is a little more rigid than the others, we have taken it on the road. We have been to Hawaii, we have been to Morocco, we have been to the Grand Canyon. I always tie in the school to our trips. We went to Hawaii recently, we took my daughters’ oceanography project and recycling project. So it went with what they were learning. When we went to the Grand Canyon they were studying geology, so what a better way to study it than going to the Grand Canyon. So it gives you that opportunity.

• K12 is more structured. If you want more flexibility with your hours, there are times when if I don’t feel like teaching because it’s a beautiful day and we want to go out, then I don’t teach that day, I teach on the weekend. Homeschooling has that flexibility depending on how flexible you want it to be. If I get up one morning and I’m not in the mood to teach, I say ok I’m not teaching, go play, and then I’ll teach on Saturday. You have that flexibility. When they are in public school you don’t have that flexibility.

• And at my age, I realized, why did I have kids to begin with? If you think about what is the purpose of having kids, is the purpose for someone else to raise them? Because when you send them off to school, you are not raising them anymore, the school is, their peers are. Sure there are kids that can handle that and go through fine, but you will realize they are picking up more from their peers than they are from you. And if you can get good peers then great. But once they leave your house they are out of your control. You have no control over what they are seeing. In Islamic schools, public schools, private schools, it doesn’t matter. When they step out of that house, they step out of your life basically. You have no control over what they are watching, what they are doing, what they are talking about. My daughter went to school with two really good Muslims, or their parents thought they were, but my daughter said no Mama, when they get to school they throw off their hijabs and their skirts go up to their knees. So what you think might be happening, may not be happening. You don’t know. But when they are in your home, you choose who their socializing with, you choose who they are going to see, you make those choices for them. You don’t let them make it for themselves, because most of the time they will choose the wrong path. Peer pressure is a really hard thing for most kids to resist.

• Now let me say a little more about the K12 program. They have some really good teachers. Most of the teachers started homeschooling because they have little kids themselves and they wanted to be more at home and plus they didn’t like the school system either. So they’re always there from 8am in the morning until 5pm to help you. You have a question you can send them an email, you can give them a phone call. If you have a problem teaching something, they will go online with the child and help them. My 6th grader she has a great teacher alhamdulillah. Every Friday he is at a local library for 4 hours to help any child that needs it.

• Homeschooling is a two parent job. I am stressing this to the fathers. Yes the fathers push us to homeschool then they say ok I’m out the door you deal with it. Fathers you really have to stand up. You have to take over some subjects. You could do the science experiments, or if you are good at math you can do the math classes. Your children need help, your wife definitely needs help.

• It is a tough job to do. It is not easy. And it is a job, this is what most people forget about. You are not only a housewife you are now a teacher. Regardless of whether you are doing it independently or with a program, we are here to help you. If you are stressed and you don’t know what you are doing, this is what this workshop is for. So for those of you who are new homeschoolers or for those who have been doing this for a while but you’re stressed out, this is what this is for - to be there for each other, to support each other in this journey, and to make our kids the best that we can make them. That is what homeschooling is all about. Jazakum Allahu khair.