Planting partnerships with homeschool families
Rebecca and Melissa
Melissa and I met in the garden at our kids’ neighborhood elementary school. We became fast friends as we put our hands to the earth and realized that we had much in common with our thoughts about health, nutrition, and ancient yoga. We both love the Lord and began taking daily walks sharing the joys, struggles, and intimate details of our lives. We decided to homeschool during the pandemic and fell in love with the same curriculum. It was as if the Lord had begun His work in that small school garden, tilling us into similar rows, and sowing the same kind of seed into our hearts of what He envisioned as the ideal scenario for our children’s growth and learning. To be in Community. It was on one of those walks that Redeeming Roots began to sprout.
Have we improved with the Times?
The current state of schools looms as an eerie darkness in the public system. A dry and parched way in which education lands in front of the kids. The rich, exciting, miraculous world of learning expunged in the name of separation of “church and state,” political correctness, or the establishment clause of the 1st amendment. Should we place the blame on the schools or the teachers? How could they keep the richness of what they were to offer when they are being forced to serve several hundred families with so many different backgrounds and legislative restrictions at every turn? Community schools were originally meant to serve 50-100 families, those who were doing community with each other, and who had the desire to teach their children how to read so that they individually could read the Bible themselves and interpret it. How far we have run from this original intent! Over the last 60 years, public school has become dull, and strict, a sliver of what the world and universe are offering as material for young minds. The pandemic opened up a magical “Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe” doorway in the minds of many and what we see possible for our children through hybrid homeschool communities.
“Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it”
— Proverbs 22:6
