If We Can Do It, You Can Do It

We live in a very rural town with a population of 3,000.

The three semi-worthwhile museums in the entire country are four hours away and not worth the drive, let alone the risk of being on highways that are prone to collapsing, speeding chicken buses, and armed robberies.

We just got internet connection a couple years ago, and it is very s l o w. We have limited bandwidth, which means that the system often crashes if we use YouTube or interactive sites for more than 5 minutes, so we can't sign up to any on-line certified programs.

We live pretty much off the grid. Both my husband and I could make decent money if we lived in a city, but we prefer to live here, in our tropical paradise. Since we don't have reliable internet access, we can't buy on-line packages. We could use mail-deliver homeschool packages or textbooks, but they're too expensive - the shipping is even more so - and we'd rather spend our money on enjoying life.

There is only one other homeschooled child in our area, and probably only a handful spread around the country, so there are no homeschool groups.

This would probably all be okay if I had a degree in Science, Math or History, but I'm a dancer and never paid much attention at school. I do have 20 years of experience working with children in the arts, but not in math or grammar, let alone science experiments. Besides language arts and history (which I did like), I can pretty much say that I am (re-)learning all the other subjects with my son - two students, no teacher.

One thing that works out very well for us is that I work with a group of 30 children who come to our house (which is also a social arts school) twice a week, so my son gets plenty of socialization space through this program.

You might be like us in that you live way out in the middle of nowhere. Or maybe you share some of our other limitations. But, as you can see, our combination of limitations is pretty full-on.

Nevertheless, we are successfully and happily homeschooling our son, who is learning all kinds of things, and doing incredible projects with the resources we have available to us.

So - as the title says - if we can do it, I bet you can do it too.