2020 sure sent us on a wild ride. At the end of the summer, with a baby on the way, a move in the near future once our house was finished being built and several months spent at home in lockdown because of COVID, we made the difficult decision to pull our girls from public school and homeschool them for the year. Even though I have a teaching background, I knew this wouldn't be easy for so many reasons, but I also knew that the options we had with our local school just wouldn't work and wouldn't be fair to our kids. While I knew it would be hard, I also knew there would be some perks too, like being flexible, especially when the new baby was born, or when we moved. I also loved that we would be able to incorporate more of the Catholic faith into our day than we ever had before.
Prior to the shut down in March of 2020, both of our older girls were enrolled in Catechesis of the Good Shepherd at our church for their faith formation. In addition to that we prayed as a family on the walk to school, at meals, and before bed. We started adding more days to celebrate to our calendar to try living liturgically more often. Many of these things we had to do before or after school, so with homeschool, I knew it could be a part of our day.
I want to share some of the ways we've incorporated religion and the Catholic faith into our homeschool day and some of the resources we've been using. I am by no means an expert and I know many Catholic families that homeschool follow a set curriculum. Since we plan to put the girls back into a traditional school, we are following the standards versus a curriculum and adding religion in throughout the day, so it is easily something we can continue whether they are in homeschool or a traditional school.
