Many parents turn to homeschooling when their child is not fitting into the traditional school system for one reason or another. Increasingly gifted children are finding a better educational fit in a home ed setting. Here is one family’s story about how they decided to homeschool their son.

Like most parents, I was nervous about my kid starting school. But when I visited our local kindergarten classroom, I felt reassured. The junior and senior kindergarten curriculum in our province was play based. He would be playing and learning. He could even bring his own books. Even though my husband and I knew that public school wouldn’t be enough for our kid for long, we thought that it would at least give us two years for me to get a career going, get debt paid off, and be in a financial position to afford something better when the time came. And at any rate, we couldn’t write it off until we had tried. Maybe Kaleb’s development would slow down, maybe he wasn’t as advanced as we thought, or maybe the school would be a miracle school and let him skip through the curriculum at his own pace. It could happen.

As it turns out, play based wasn’t enough for my kiddo. He asked me every night when he could go to “real school” and complained that they didn’t even have a periodic table. Because can you even call yourself a school if you don’t have a periodic table?

He soon grew anxious and started missing school. Every Sunday night like clock work he was coming down with a fever. He even puked a few times. I convinced myself that it was just school. He was building his immunity. And maybe that’s what it was. But I also knew that these could be warning signs, and we decided to go through with a psycho-educational assessment despite his young age. After we got the results, I cried. We weighed our options, but no one would offer acceleration. We decided to pull Kaleb out of public school in favour of homeschooling.

Read the rest of the story at the Life At Tiffany’s blog.